This may be a silly question, but why are phonetically regular words like "stop", "jump", "must", and "ask" taught as sight words? I understand the need to teach irregular words like "his" and "said" and have done so with my daughter, but why is there such a movement toward teaching regularly spelled words as sight words? Am I missing something?
Sight words are just the most common words that occur most often in books. Not all the words are exceptions to the phonics rules. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Exactly. Even as adults, our sight word vocabulary builds. For example, as you are reading this right now, I bet you aren't sounding out every letter as you are reading right? For an adult, every word in this post is probably a sight word. That is the purpose of teaching sight words.
I know, isn't reading amazing? I've often thought this past year about how much I take it for granted. Our minds are so masterfully designed! Fluent readers have a really complicated process going on in their brains. Have you ever taken that exam/game where you read the scrambled words aloud, unscrambling them as you read? It's amazing the way our brains can decode words once we have reading down. That's awfully different for the emergent reader, though, don't you think? Anyway, no big deal about the sight words. I just always wondered about the regular words. It makes sense to help them read common words more quickly, regular or not. But when we come to a phonetically regular sight word, I have her sound it out first, I point out any phonics rules that apply, and then approach it like the other sight words. If she gets stuck on a regular word, I don't tell her what it is because I know she has the skills to decode it. We take it from the top and go through the sounding out process again. The reading curriculum I'm using discourages sight words until a child can read 3 letter short-vowel words easily. I know many other programs take different approaches. I'm sure that's a good thing, because not every child would do well with the same program
I never learned any words phonetically until 3rd grade when a teacher told me to "Sound it out" and I had no clue what she was talking about! I specifically remember how I thought it was Dumb the teachers made us know the alphabet just to learn to read. I'm now learning Phonics rules I never even heard of. Reading is an interesting concept, that people can learn it in such drastically different ways and still be competent in it.
My daughter and her husband both are school teachers. Last week she told me the strangest thing. She said if you write something and spell all the words wrong but use the correct letters in the words, but have the first and last letters in the right place, you can still read the sentence or paragraph. I thought it would never work but it does. Even my 8 year old can read what I write. My other daughter who is a twin to the teacher daughter, had a paper where you read a section and tell how many "f's" you saw. Almost every one says the wrong amount because it says our brains skip over the word of and therefore we don't count the f in of. I don't know if this makes any sense but it was fun trying those reading tricks. The human brain is amazing or The hmaun barin is azmanig.
Sloan, that was the unscrambling game I was talking about! I read a whole paragraph written that way w/o batting an eye! It was wild. If I tried to get my newly reading 5 y/o to read it, though, she wouldn't be able to. A lot of the "how" behind reading those scrambled paragraphs lies in context. Her language skills are not that highly developed yet. She is getting much faster with her reading, but I can tell that her little mind is still moving left to right in a methodical way, sounding it out. She surprises me sometimes, though. I added "number" to the sight word pile the other day and before I even pointed out anything about the phonics, she read it quick as anything. I asked her how she read that so quickly. She said, "I don't know. I just read what it says". LOL, well. Anyway, thanks everyone for your two cents on the sight words. Fun discussion.
Here is what I found.. I knew the paragraph you guys were talking about and check this out.... Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Or rather... According to a researcher (sic) at Cambridge University, it doesn't matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that the first and last letter be at the right place. The rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without problem. This is because the human mind does not read every letter by itself but the word as a whole. Here is a web page that discusses it more... http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/
Unfortunately, spammers use this quirk in our brains to mix up the letters in words so that baysean filters don't catch them - for example mortgage == morgtage when you're reading fast.
