Teaching sight words or high frequency words is still essential for early readers to build fluency and confidence. The Science of Reading isn’t just about decoding! Teachers still need to help their children learn sight words.

What Are Sight Words?

Sight words are words that the reader recognises automatically by sight. They are often small words with unusual spelling patterns which make them difficult for a child to sound out. Sight words do not usually have a concrete image to represent them either. Therefore, these high frequency words may not be able to be pictured by a child or even decoded effectively using picture clues.

Sight words are the words most commonly found in texts and account for up to 75 percent of the words children will come across when learning to read and write.

Several sight word lists have been compiled and published over the years. Some of the oldest and most popular are the Dolch List and Fry’s List of sight words. These lists contain frequently used words like - the, of, and, a, to, in, is, you, that and it. These ten words alone account for about 25 percent of all the words found in children’s texts.

You can download the complete Dolch and Fry’s Sight Word Lists HERE in my FREE resource library.

Why Learn Sight Words?

Being able to instantly recognise a bank of sight words gives the beginning reader an advantage.

Because sight words appear so regularly, children need to be able to recognise and read them almost immediately upon seeing them. Automatic recognition of sight words develops accuracy, speed and fluency in reading. These vital reading skills help to build self-confidence in children learning to read.

If children have instant recognition of the sight words in a text, they will be much more likely to read with confidence and see themselves as readers. If a child has difficulty automatically recognising the sight words, they can become frustrated and develop a negative attitude towards reading.

Instant recognition of the sight words within a text also gives children room to focus their attention on decoding other difficult words in the text. Many sight words have unusual spelling patterns and cannot be easily sounded out or represented using pictures. If children can recognise most of the words in a text before they even begin to read it, they can focus on meaning and comprehension. Automatic recognition of sight words gives children the opportunity to read without having to stop and decode every single word.

How To Teach Sight Words?

Teaching sight words is one part of an effective reading program. The teaching of sight words alone does not develop phonological awareness or skills in decoding phonetically. You can find out more about the importance of phonological awareness and phonics in the blog post HERE.

Memorization of sight words is a common expectation of children learning to read but should not be the primary focus in reading instruction. Modern research suggests that the brain learns to read using letter-sound relationships - phonics.

Whole word instruction, the look-say memorization method, may discourage and inhibit the development of orthographic mapping, strong neural communication pathways, and accurate neural word form models, potentially disabling development of skilled reading, especially for new, struggling, and dyslexic students.

(Ehri,1998; Ehri, 1991; Farrell, Osenga, & Hunter, 2013b; Dehaene, 2011; Laurita, 1966; Moats, 1999; Shaywitz, 2003).

Therefore, it is essential that a reading program combines sight word memorization along with the explicit and systematic teaching of phonics. This will ensure children will be taught the essential skills and strategies to be effective readers.

I have found children are not very enthusiastic when it comes to memorizing and learning sight words. For this reason, I have designed 35 hands-on games and activities to help children learn their sight words in a fun and engaging way.

Sight Word Games

Here’s a few sight word games that are amongst our absolute favourites. These games are so much fun!!! They are regularly requested in our classroom.

1.    Snowball Fight: Write each word onto a piece of paper and crumple each one up into a ball to make a sight word snowball. Give each child one or two snowballs to throw around the room. After about 30 seconds, children stop and open the snowballs closest to them to read the words.  These snowballs can be reused.

2.    Sight Word Stomp: The children sit in a circle. The sight words are written onto cards and randomly placed on the floor inside the circle. The teacher sits in the circle between any 2 children. These 2 children stand. The teacher says one of the sight words on the cards within the circle. The first child to race and stomp on the correct word is the winner. Both children return to their places within the circle. The winning child stays standing ready to compete against the next competitor. The next competitor is the child sitting right next to the losing child. This competitor stands and races against the current winner to find the next word said by the teacher. The game continues around the circle until everyone has had a turn and you have the grand champion.

3.    Milkshake: This game is similar to the traditional game of Hangman. When a child misses a letter of the sight word, you draw a line (the base of a milkshake glass). That's followed by a longer horizontal line joined to the base (one side of the glass), then the other side of the glass. Next you draw the curved top of the glass (the front rim) and then the straight top of the glass (the back rim). For the next mistake, draw a line across the middle of the glass (to represent the milkshake in the glass). There are only 2 lines left making a bent straw in the milkshake.

If you like these games, you will just love my entire selection of 35 tried and tested sight word games. They are available in my store or by clicking the Add To Cart button below. This set of 35 fun educational games and activities have been designed to teach and reinforce any list of sight words. They are suitable for small group and whole class activities.

You will love how engaged your children will be if you start using games to learn sight words. We play Sight Word Stomp every day in our classroom. The children LOVE this game and are so very disappointed if we don’t manage to fit it into our day. Learning sight words through play could not be more engaging or easier to organise!!