Make sure to point out what makes the words tricky for students, think about grouping similar words together, and then make sure to find ways for kids to engage with the words frequently. It’s not just taught once and done forever. You continually have to keep practicing with these words.
~ Zeba McGibbon from Episode 77 of The Kindergarten Cafe Podcast
Episode Summary
Teaching sight words, high-frequency words, trick works, whatever you choose to call them are a key element of early literacy. In this episode, I discuss the evolution of sight word instruction, and talk about outdated methods of rote memorization with a more effective strategy that introduces one word per week. It’s a necessity to memorize high-frequency words that often defy phonetic rules, such as “my” and “like” and I outline my approach to engaging students through interactive routines. Using fully decodable poems and hands-on activities like word walls and games, I stress the importance of ongoing practice to reinforce sight word recognition.
In this episode I share:
- Phonics and Sight Words Connection
- Strategies for Teaching Sight Words
- Routine for Teaching Sight Words
- Engaging Students with Sight Words
Resources:
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- Website – www.kindergartencafe.org
- Tik Tok – @kindergartencafe
Read the Transcript
[0:00] Hey teacher friends, it’s Zeba from Kindergarten Cafe. Today we are continuing our mini-series on literacy. Last week we talked about teaching vocabulary in kindergarten, so if you missed that, definitely go back and give that a listen. Today we’re talking all about sight words and how I teach sight words in kindergarten. Let me be clear, there’s lots of names for this, trick words, high-frequency words, sight words, heart words. I’m going to get into all of that in this episode.
[0:31] Music. You’re listening to the kindergarten cafe podcast where kindergarten teachers come to learn classroom tested tips and tricks and teaching ideas they can use in their classroom right away I’m Zeba creator and founder of kindergarten cafe and i help kindergarten teachers with everything they need from arrival to dismissal in order to save time, work smarter, not harder, and support students with engaging and purposeful lessons. I’m here to cheer you on through your successes and breakthroughs and offer support and resources so you never have to feel stuck or alone. Ready to start saving time and reducing costs? Music.
[1:24] So over the years, there’s definitely been a lot of changing research and changing information about how we want to teach sight words for our young readers. I think that there were some schools and schools of thought that like you just want to get kids to memorize as many words as possible. And they’d have kindergartners trying to memorize 100, 200 words in the year. And personally, I was never comfortable with that. I just thought that was unrealistic and not helpful for the students in terms of learning how to read. I was teaching my kids one sight word a week, and that worked really well for me. My school focused on particularly 20 words and really made sure that they had a solid foundation of those 20 words. And then first grade, they focused on 100 words. I don’t think there’s like a right or wrong answer in terms of like the number of how many words to teach, but I do think focusing on like 100, 200 words is like too many. I still think that’s too many. But right now I am focusing on one word a week sometimes.
[2:33] I’m going to get into that. I’ll tell you why I sometimes teach two or three a week. It depends on the word that I’m teaching. Why do we want to teach sight words to our young readers? There are some words that kids cannot sound out. And there are some words that kids cannot sound out with the knowledge of phonics that they have in kindergarten. So for example, a word like my.
[3:01] Eventually they’ll learn that the Y at the end of a two-letter word like that, or just at the end of the word, can sometimes have the long I or the long E sound. It acts as the vowel, but we’re not there yet in kindergarten. We’ve literally just taught them that Y says yeah.
[3:20] So now we’re saying it sometimes says I and E, like we’re not there yet. That’s okay. So they have to learn my as a separate word because they’re going to see that word a lot, but they don’t know how to decode it. They don’t have the phonics skills to know why it says I or E. And the other example would be the word like. They see that word a lot. They write that word a lot, but they haven’t learned the silent E rule yet. They might be the end of the year. They might by first grade for sure, but we’re not there yet when we’ve just taught them to say l-i-k-e. Licka, right? They can’t sound that out. And we’ve been teaching them to sound things out very clearly. So that’s why we need to teach that word as a whole word. And we want them to memorize it because it is a word that they’re gonna have to just know. But we can use our sight words to help introduce some of these phonic skills. And so that’s where sort of this changing terminology comes from. So like there’s sight word, meaning a word that they have to know by sight. High frequency word, meaning a word they’re going to see a lot. Trick word is another way to call these words that like they don’t follow the phonics rules that the kids know.
[4:38] Heart words, words you have to know by heart, but also that’s more of a science reading approach where you’re pointing out the phonics rules that the kids will learn from the word. I don’t think it matters what you call them.
[4:52] Whatever you want to call them, however you want to say it, is fine as long as you are teaching these words. And you’re picking the words that the kids are going to be reading and writing the most in kindergarten. What’s going to help them be better readers and writers in words that they can’t sound out on their own? So for example, like a high frequency word of it, they’re going to see a lot, but they can decode that. And you do want them to be able to read it as it and not it, it each time, but they might have to decode it for a little bit until they have memorized it. But that’s sort of the difference between the high frequency word versus trick word. It’s not trick word. It’s just a word they’re going to see a lot. So anyway, I don’t think it matters what you call it, but here’s how I teach my students these words.
[5:33] Let’s take, for example, the. When I’m teaching this trick word, and I like to call them trick words to my students because I always often say English likes to trick you, and we talk about how it’s tricking you. I’ll show the word, and I say this is the word the, and I have the kids say it the, and I say it the. Does this sound like the vocabulary lesson? It should. I have them repeat it three times, and then I highlight what’s unique about the word. So, for example, in this word, I talk about how TH says th, th, or th, and I say, we’re going to learn all about that later. But the really tricky part of this word is the E, and I put a little heart over the E, because that’s the part that they’re going to have to really pay attention to. That’s the part that’s different. And I say, we just learned that E says eh, but in this case, it’s saying uh, the. And I also highlight in this word with the, how sometimes the can be said the, like the red apple, the red apple. And I was like, there’s no right or wrong. There’s no rhyme or reason. Some people say it that way. For some words, it makes sense to me. I say it that way sometimes. Sometimes I don’t. You can say either way. Mostly I say the. So I just highlight that to them. So I introduce the word and I talk about how it is unique, what is tricky about it. And then I go on to teaching them how to use the word in some of today’s activities.
[6:58] Before I tell you about that, I just want to highlight a couple of things. So I talked about how I use this as an opportunity to teach about a tricky part of the word. If there is a phonics rule that helps the kids understand the word, then I will teach that. So for example, with like, I would teach them that the E makes the I say its name in this case, and the E is silent. If there’s a word with ing. I would tell them that ing is a chunk at the end of words. It tells us that someone’s doing something right then and there, like walking, jumping, stuff like that. But if there are words that all kind of have the same phonics rule that the kids haven’t learned yet, I will teach more than one word a week. So for example, I think next week I’m teaching my kids to and do. Or no, I just taught them that. Anyway, the point is I chose to and do together because I taught the kids that in this case, the O where we think it should say aw, O octopus aw, it’s saying oo, to and do.
[8:05] Okay. And I put those together to help them really remember that phonics rule and that they can more easily remember the sound that the O makes in that word because they’re learning them together. Later on, I’ll teach them so, no, go as words together. And we’ll talk about how the O is saying its name, because often in two letter words, when it ends in a vowel, the vowel is going to say its name. And so I’ll teach those words together to really help the kids learn the phonics rule and remember the sounds in the words. So that is the exception to when I’ll teach more than one word in a week because it’s helping them learn why the words are that way and to me it makes sense because they’re going to be able to learn more words as they go in a way more meaningful way than I ever have in the past. Doing it this way I’ve seen kids be much better at remembering the words that I’ve taught them when I go into the phonics rules and relate the words with other like words when I teach the words at the same time as teaching similar words.
[9:11] So and to be clear I don’t do this at the very beginning of the year.
[9:15] I do teach trick words the beginning of the year. I start like a month into school. I start with the and I and a. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong time to start teaching sight words. Every teacher on my grade teaches them at different times, starts teaching them at different times. For me, when I’m teaching them early on in the year, I’m teaching them the routine of learning sight words, but I don’t expect them to have memorized them, to have learned them that early on in the year. I expect for me as a teacher to have to come back to them over and over again. It’s more introducing them to the concept of this is a word, this is what a trick word is, that kind of thing. And some kids are ready. But for me, I don’t necessarily think that once you’ve taught it once that it’s done, they’ve learned it, check it off your list, especially for those first couple of words. Until they’ve really had a strong foundation in decoding and putting sounds together to make words, like they’re not going to fully understand that that word is a trick word until they know what a decodable word is. But that doesn’t stop me from introducing it early on in the year. And like I said, introducing the routine. So what is my routine of teaching kids how to read sight words, trick words, high frequency words? I introduce the word, like I said, and then I show them the poem that we’re going to do that has the word in the poem.
[10:39] The poems, I’ve created poems this year for the first time ever that are fully decodable.
[10:45] And a lot of them have tunes or songs like that go with them. But I’m really excited that they’re fully decodable because for years I used poems that I liked that had the word in them that were seasonal but they were not decodable and so I was just encouraging kids to memorize the whole poem and not really understand it so I’m really excited about these poems they’ve been working really well this year so we read the poem and then the kids highlight the word in the poem so they’re right there interacting with the word by reading it and finding it in the poem. Then they have to go and write the word. They’re tracing the word in a decodable book. This is also new for me this year. I had high frequency books that were more, they were not all decodable. They were oftentimes memorizing patterns and guessing at pictures. I’ve moved away from that, learning what’s best for kids and learning how to read. So I have the kids tracing the sight word in a fully decodable book and I am loving this this year I love that I can hand it them and say I know for a fact you can read every single word in this book once you’ve learned this word and so the kids are then practicing writing the word and then reading the word when because I say you have to trace and read so there they’ve had so many interactions with the word that it’s really setting a good foundation. Now, again, I was just said, I don’t think it’s one and done. Check it off your list.
[12:11] This book goes into their book bags. They can read it during reading time. The poem goes home every Friday in a poetry folder. And so they can, if their family chooses, read it and reread older poems as well. The words that I introduced go outside our door as a password.
[12:30] And so the kids to come into the room have to read the word of the week. Once they’ve left our password, then they go on to our word wall. And when they’re on our word wall, the kids can go up and find the word and bring it to their seat if they’re needing to write it, if they’re needing help with reading it. But usually they use it for writing. So they’ll go find the word and bring it to their seat because it’s on magnets and then write the word and then they’ll put it back on the word wall.
[13:03] They also have the word wall in their writing folder, but they much prefer to go up and get the word and bring it to their seat. They hardly ever use the word wall in their writing folder, something I’m working on with them about using their resources. But the word wall in their writing folder has all the words we’re going to learn, whereas the word wall has just the words we have learned up until this moment. So that could be why they prefer that. So I think whatever you’re going to call these words, sight words, trick words, high frequency words, I think that making sure to point out what makes them tricky for students, thinking about grouping similar words together, and then making sure to find ways for kids to engage with the words frequently and knowing that it’s not just taught once and done forever, that you continually have to keep practicing with these words is really important. Oh, and I forgot one more. One more way that I add in high-frequency practice in my class is in a word work center during center time. The kids can do roll and write, where they roll the dice and write in trick words, or they can build the word with magnet tiles and then write it with whiteboard markers. But they especially love playing go fish with the words they absolutely love that they have to read the word and say do you have this word do you have the and the person say no i don’t have the go fish it’s such a huge hit so those are other ways to keep the practicing going of words that we have learned.
[14:30] So all that to say, that strategy works for me. Those routines work for me in my class. If you have a routine that works for you, feel free to message me. I’d love to hear from you. But I’m definitely proud of my high frequency word poems and books this year that I’ve started with my class. It’s been going really, really well. So I do recommend them, especially after seeing my class use them and hearing from other teachers that have used them. It’s definitely worth a look if you’re looking to revamp the way you teach high-frequency words. So, awesome. Our quote of the day, a boy was trying to write the end or the end. See, that’s an example where the end, you say the instead of the. If anyone knows why it’s the and the, definitely reach out to me. Anyway, he was trying to write the end, and he wrote be, the letter B, end. Be end. So great example of why we need to teach kids to read and write those high-frequency words. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Stay tuned next week where I will get into more about my centers. I’ve alluded to them a little bit with vocabulary and sight words. So I’ll get into all of that next week with an episode on science of reading literacy centers.
[15:43] Music.
[15:49] Thanks so much for listening to the Kindergarten Cafe podcast. Be sure to check out the show notes for more information and resources, or just head straight to kindergartencafe.org for all the goodies. If you liked this episode, the best ways to show your support are to subscribe, leave a review, or send it to a friend. I’ll be back next week with even more kindergarten tips. See you then.