What sound do you hear in the middle? /e/. Then move on to the tricky parts of the word. Help students connect the phonemes to their spelling. Draw three lines on the board to represent each sound. Have students count the sounds they hear. You can also let students come up with their own sentences using the word in context. Next, use the word in a sentence to give it meaning and context. Let’s use the word “said” as an example.įirst, start by simply saying the word and having students repeat. When introducing sight words either whole group or in small groups, there are a few easy ways that you can help students activate each processor in their brain. You can promote the orthographic mapping of high frequency words with a few easy changes to your sight word routine. In reality, explicit instruction that promotes the process of orthographic mapping can only help to strengthen these skills in every student. Some readers will be able to develop orthographic mapping skills naturally, but other students will need repeated direct instruction. These stored words have become sight words. Orthographic mappingĪccording to David Kilpatrick, orthographic mapping is the process we used to store words in our brain for easy retrieval. For some students it will take only a few exposures to build those connections, and for others it will take hundreds. In order for words to become sight words, we must help our students put those processors together, particularly the phonological and orthographic processors. It uses the context that the word is being used in to help us further understand the meaning of the word. This processor words in tandem with the meaning processor. When we read, our brain takes the information from the phonological and orthographic processor and helps us make sense of the word we are reading.įinally, the context processor. The meaning processor helps us determine the meaning of words.

Students with weak orthographic processing skills may rely heavily on sounding out words, struggle with letter recognition and automaticity, or have frequent spelling errors. The orthographic processor understands that written letters, or graphemes, make up words. This is t where phonemic awareness occurs. The phonological processor helps us understand that phonemes, or sounds, make up words. The strongest sight word instruction will address each of these processors to help students build connections in their brain. Louisa Moats says that our brain uses phonological, orthographic, meaning, and context processors when recognizing a word. Research shows that when our brain reads a word, there are actually four parts of the brain that are working together. So how do we help those high frequency words become sight words? How does the brain learn to read? Most of the word can usually still be decoded, but there will be one or more parts that students need to know by heart. Heart words are high frequency words that have at least one part that is irregular and, therefore, not decodable to students. High frequency words can be both decodable or not decodable to our students. These are words that our students need to learn because they will show up in the books that they are reading. High frequency words are the most commonly occurring words in text. Our goal when teaching high frequency words is that they will eventually become sight words. The average adult has 30,000 to 60,000 sight words in their memory bank. Sight words are any words that you can instantly recognize by sight.

These terms are often used interchangeably by teachers so it can quickly get confusing, but there are distinct differences. Before we dive in, let’s quickly discuss the difference between sight words vs.

Kindergarten list of sight words