Sight word reading

Teach Your Child to Read

Print your own sight words flash cards. Create a set of Dolch or Fry sight words flash cards, or use your own custom set of words.

Follow the sight words teaching techniques. Learn research-validated and classroom-proven ways to introduce words, reinforce learning, and correct mistakes.

Play sight words games. Make games that create fun opportunities for repetition and reinforcement of the lessons.

Learn what phonological and phonemic awareness are and why they are the foundations of child literacy. Learn how to teach phonemic awareness to your kids.

A sequenced curriculum of over 80 simple activities that take children from beginners to high-level phonemic awareness. Each activity includes everything you need to print and an instructional video.

Teach phoneme and letter sounds in a way that makes blending easier and more intuitive. Includes a demonstration video and a handy reference chart.

Sightwords.com is a comprehensive sequence of teaching activities, techniques, and materials for one of the building blocks of early child literacy. This collection of resources is designed to help teachers, parents, and caregivers teach a child how to read. We combine the latest literacy research with decades of teaching experience to bring you the best methods of instruction to make teaching easier, more effective, and more fun.

Sight words build speed and fluency when reading. Accuracy, speed, and fluency in reading increase reading comprehension. The sight words are a collection of words that a child should learn to recognize without sounding out the letters. The sight words are both common, frequently used words and foundational words that a child can use to build a vocabulary. Combining sight words with phonics instruction increases a child’s speed and fluency in reading.

This website includes a detailed curriculum outline to give you an overview of how the individual lessons fit together. It provides detailed instructions and techniques to show you how to teach the material and how to help a child overcome common roadblocks. It also includes free teaching aids, games, and other materials that you can download and use with your lessons.

Many of the teaching techniques and games include variations for making the lesson more challenging for advanced students, easier for new or struggling students, and just different for a bit of variety. There are also plenty of opportunities, built into the lessons and games, to observe and assess the child’s retention of the sight words. We encourage you to use these opportunities to check up on the progress of your student and identify weaknesses before they become real problems.

Help us help you. We want this to be a resource that is constantly improving. So please provide us with your feedback, both the good and the bad. We want to know which lessons worked for your child, and which fell short. We encourage you to contribute your own ideas that have worked well in the home or classroom. You can communicate with us through email or simply post a response in the comments section of the relevant page.

Dolch Sight Words List | Sight Words: Teach Your Child to Read

All the Dolch sight word lists, divided by grade, also available as printable PDFs.

Five techniques for teaching Dolch sight words. Learn proven ways to introduce words, reinforce learning, and correct mistakes.

Print a set of Dolch sight word flash cards, or use our generator to create your own custom cards.

Print cards and game boards for 18 Dolch sight word games. A fun way to reinforce sight words lessons!

The Dolch Sight Words list is the most commonly used set of sight words. Educator Dr. Edward William Dolch developed the list in the 1930s-40s by studying the most frequently occurring words in children’s books of that era. The list contains 220 “service words” plus 95 high-frequency nouns. These words comprise 80% of the words you would find in a typical children’s book and 50% of the words found in writing for adults. Once a child knows this list of words, it makes reading much easier, because the child can then focus his or her attention on the remaining words.

The Dolch words are commonly divided into groups by grade level, ranging from pre-kindergarten to third grade, with a separate list of nouns. There are a total of 315 Dolch Sight Words.

Pre-K Dolch Sight Words
(40 words)
a, and, away, big, blue, can, come, down, find, for, funny, go, help, here, I, in, is, it, jump, little, look, make, me, my, not, one, play, red, run, said, see, the, three, to, two, up, we, where, yellow, you
Kindergarten Dolch Sight Words
(52 words)
all, am, are, at, ate, be, black, brown, but, came, did, do, eat, four, get, good, have, he, into, like, must, new, no, now, on, our, out, please, pretty, ran, ride, saw, say, she, so, soon, that, there, they, this, too, under, want, was, well, went, what, white, who, will, with, yes
First Grade Dolch Sight Words
(41 words)
after, again, an, any, as, ask, by, could, every, fly, from, give, going, had, has, her, him, his, how, just, know, let, live, may, of, old, once, open, over, put, round, some, stop, take, thank, them, then, think, walk, were, when
Second Grade Dolch Sight Words
(46 words)
always, around, because, been, before, best, both, buy, call, cold, does, don’t, fast, first, five, found, gave, goes, green, its, made, many, off, or, pull, read, right, sing, sit, sleep, tell, their, these, those, upon, us, use, very, wash, which, why, wish, work, would, write, your
Third Grade Dolch Sight Words
(41 words)
about, better, bring, carry, clean, cut, done, draw, drink, eight, fall, far, full, got, grow, hold, hot, hurt, if, keep, kind, laugh, light, long, much, myself, never, only, own, pick, seven, shall, show, six, small, start, ten, today, together, try, warm
Noun Dolch Sight Words
(95 words)
apple, baby, back, ball, bear, bed, bell, bird, birthday, boat, box, boy, bread, brother, cake, car, cat, chair, chicken, children, Christmas, coat, corn, cow, day, dog, doll, door, duck, egg, eye, farm, farmer, father, feet, fire, fish, floor, flower, game, garden, girl, goodbye, grass, ground, hand, head, hill, home, horse, house, kitty, leg, letter, man, men, milk, money, morning, mother, name, nest, night, paper, party, picture, pig, rabbit, rain, ring, robin, Santa Claus, school, seed, sheep, shoe, sister, snow, song, squirrel, stick, street, sun, table, thing, time, top, toy, tree, watch, water, way, wind, window, wood
All Dolch Sight Words by group
All Dolch Sight Words in alphabetical order

Graspp - translation app with interesting mechanics - Wylsacom

You can translate words by pointing your finger at them.

Russian developers have launched the Graspp application (iOS). This is a special translator and dictionary, "sharpened" for reading books, magazines and documents in English. To translate a word in Graspp, just point at it with your finger right in the text, and then point the camera. The application will recognize the finger and the text and show the translation.

Why a finger?

The Graspp developers believe that "pointing" is one of the most natural human gestures. We absolutely do not need to strain to point at a word in the text with our finger. Many people even do it intuitively when they want to “focus” on a word or remember where they left off. In addition, such interaction minimally distracts the user from reading: he saw an unfamiliar word, pointed with his finger, pointed the camera for a second, spied on the translation and put the phone down. nine0003

What about Google Translate?

Indeed, Google Translate has had the function of translating text through the camera for several years. The problem with this mode is that Google Translate translates all the text that the camera "sees". That is, if you hover the translator over a page of English text, we will see something like this:

This is the main difference between Graspp and other AR translators: Graspp offers a convenient and elegant way to search for one desired word that occurs in the text when reading in English. nine0003

The main idea behind Google Translate is to help you read text even if the user doesn't know the language at all. The main idea of Graspp is to suggest the right word while reading in a foreign language when you are reading.

And if one hand is busy with a book, what then?

In this case, the developers of Graspp came up with two more convenient ways to translate words in printed text.

Firstly, you can translate words using the sight. To do this, hold down the button and aim at the right word. Yes, like in a computer game, but instead of zombies there are foreign words. nine0003

Secondly, you can tap on the desired word right on the screen. Imagine that each word is a button. Click on the words and Graspp will suggest the translation.

For all words, the application can show detailed dictionary entries, transcriptions and play audio pronunciations.

Sleep mode

Another interesting invention of the developers is a special sleep mode, which enters the application when you put the phone on the table. In it, the application dims the screen, shows only the last words and does nothing else - this saves battery. When you take the phone in your hand, Graspp “comes to life” again and is ready to translate! nine0003

If you have an interesting app, please email [email protected] and tell the world about your project.

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why we read so slowly, or how to read 80 books in a year - T&P

Francis Bacon said: "Some books should be tasted, some should be swallowed, and only a few should be chewed and digested.

" We are used to chewing on each book, even if we are not sure that we need it or that we are able to digest it, or, on the contrary, do not touch the four-volume book, realizing that the process will take a long time. T&P decided to understand the technique of reading and understand why we read slowly and how to speed up this process without losing quality. nine0044

Reading is one of the basic skills that we learn at the age of four to six. But having learned to read confidently in the first or second grade, for some reason we decide that we have reached the heights, and no longer pay attention to the development of this skill. Speed reading is completely shrouded in many myths. The fear that, by increasing the speed of reading, a person will stop doing it thoughtfully, is rather naive. Here we can draw an analogy with sports, because speed reading is a kind of sports reading. And if the ability to run fast does not lead to the fact that a person forgets how to walk, then why should this happen with reading? nine0003

In a word, the problem lies precisely in the perception of the norm. A speed of 200–250 words per minute is considered normal. At the same time, the catch lies in the very unit of measurement - words per minute. Speed reading is not reading word by word as such, but rather reading in semantic blocks, due to which, in many respects, it is possible to increase the amount of reading by five to ten times. So why do we read slowly and what prevents us from speeding up? There are quite a few reasons for the low reading speed: some of them are related to the psyche, and some are related to physiology. However, any barrier to dynamic reading can be overcome. nine0003

Internal prompter

The most common enemy of speed reading is subvocalization (speaking to yourself). Have you noticed that even when reading street signs, people often whisper new names? Duplicating the read text to yourself (sometimes even with articulation) is one of the most serious obstacles to speed reading. Firstly, because, by pronouncing what we read, we reduce the speed of reading to the pace of oral speech, and secondly, this is a habit that we have unconsciously practiced for almost our entire lives and which is not easy to unlearn. nine0003

To remove internal articulation, you need to reorient your internal prompter from speaking to recognition. Pronunciation is turned on mainly when faced with new information, so it is necessary to work with unfamiliar vocabulary. When a compound word is first encountered in a text, it is necessary to read it slowly and carefully. If the meaning of the word is not quite clear, it is necessary to clarify it so that the visual image and content are correlated. "Photograph" the words with your eyes. Every time you stumble over an unfamiliar word, try closing your eyes and imagining how it is spelled. The good news is that recognition is an automatic process: once you memorize a word, it will happen effortlessly afterwards. For example, by slowly saying “deoxyribonucleic acid”, clarifying the meaning and “photographing” the phrase, the next time your brain will understand that we are talking about DNA before you physically have time to finish reading it. nine0003

See wider

The main physiological limitation of fast reading is the narrow field of view. As already mentioned, speed reading is reading not by words, but by blocks. Many are faced with a low visual ability to cover a certain amount of information at a time. But again, the good news is that peripheral vision can be developed, and fairly quickly.

Try to stop looking at some object and focus. Then, without moving your gaze or changing focus, try to visually capture the maximum number of objects around you. If you read newspapers, reading columns is a great exercise for you. Try to cover the entire line of one column: one visual fixation - one line of the column. At the initial stage of training, a vertical line drawn in the middle of the column will be a good help. This will help to quickly accustom the eye to focus on the middle of the line. nine0003

It is valuable not only and not so much knowledge of specific speed reading techniques, but understanding the reasons for slow reading and habits that prevent you from increasing speed

you can find ready-made ones on the Internet or even download the appropriate mobile application for yourself. There are many variants of Schulte tables. The most common one is a 5×5 square, in which the numbers from 1 to 25 are randomly located in the cells. The task is to move your eyes from 1 to 25 as soon as possible. And the goal is to do this with a gradual increase in speed. However, to train peripheral vision, one condition must be observed: the gaze must be fixed on the central cell of the table, that is, you need to look for numbers without shifting the focus. nine0003

Curiously, everyone has developed peripheral vision. It’s just that in some cases we use it (for example, while driving a car or when the object of our love or boss entered the room), and in others (as in the situation with reading), this habit is simply not developed in us. If you increase the importance of reading for yourself and extend the habit to this area of life, you will soon notice the result.

Repetition is not always the mother of learning

Most of us have a not very productive habit of looking back at the text we have just read: we have not had time to read the right page to the end, as we again clarify something on the left. Rereading takes a lot of time. Such "regressions" in the form of repeated reading are directly related to the processes of remembering information, so the key to solving them is in the development of memory. Both familiar exercises like learning foreign languages or memorizing poetry, as well as less well-known mnemonics will do. For example, try to remember a chain of unrelated words. A gradual increase in the number of links contributes to an increase in the amount of RAM. nine0003

After each page you read, give it a figurative title. This will help consolidate what you read and save you from having to go back. This task is more suitable for children, but adults can also find it useful. The simplest exercise that will help get rid of repeated reading is tracking the return movements of the eyes. It is necessary to agree with yourself that you can return to what you have read only after the text has been read to the end. At the same time, you will practice discipline, as the force of habit will constantly push you to violate the contract. The second point, which is very important: you need to return to the text not mechanically, but consciously, mentally asking yourself a question, the answer to which you need to find. nine0003

As for everyday habits, you can reduce the use of organizers and all kinds of reminder devices. You can start by going to the store when the list of necessary purchases is only in your head. Visualizing your list can help: mentally put everything you are going to buy into a bag, imagining how it looks like. It often happens that during a lecture or a heated argument, a phrase that was said a couple of minutes ago is forgotten. Returning to the previous page in such a situation is a little more problematic, so the skill of keeping information in your head will be useful in many situations and save resources. nine0003

I didn't notice the elephant

Inattention and absent-mindedness are also serious obstacles to the development of speed reading. Reading in itself requires increased attention from us, as it involves many parts of the brain at the same time. With an increase in reading speed, the requirement for concentration also increases. It's like driving a vehicle: a pedestrian at a speed of 5 km/h needs a certain level of attention and responsiveness, and a driver, even at a minimum speed of 60 km/h, needs to be 12 times more attentive! Thus, one of the most important skills for developing speed reading is the ability to hold attention. The increase in concentration is facilitated by exercises to suppress the internal dialogue, reduce the reaction to external stimuli, as well as work with the psychophysiological causes of inattention. nine0003

An effective concentration exercise is reading words backwards. This warm-up can be done anywhere: on the way to work or while doing some kind of routine. Choose a word, imagine how it is spelled, and then read it backwards. It is better to start with simple words: milk is near, holiday is kindzarp, and so on, gradually increasing the length and complexity of the words. It is important not to write anything down, but to do everything in your mind. If this activity seems boring to you, get an educational board game that includes such tasks and combine the development of mindfulness with communication with friends. In the game "Equivoki", for example, there is a task "Infernal vice versa", which is far from being possible for everyone. Reading with a metronome also teaches you to concentrate. Download the program to your phone and set the speed you need in the settings (number of beats per minute). It is convenient to use a metronome when reading newspaper columns (see exercises for the development of peripheral vision). Adjusting the reading speed to a metronome helps not only keep the pace, but also turn off critical thinking for a while and focus on the reading process. nine0003

The reason for inattention can also be purely psychological barriers. For example, a lack of interest in reading. The best medicine here, of course, is the choice of literature that interests you. If this is a text from the “very necessary” series, then interest in oneself can be awakened: you need to look for it in why exactly you need it, what will change in your life with the acquisition of new knowledge. Distractedness is also often the result of physical fatigue, so the universal advice here is to break every 20 minutes for at least one minute, preferably with relaxation for the eyes. nine0003

The development of mindfulness is extremely important, since the amount of assimilated information largely depends on this ability. To increase the speed of reading technically, not being ready to assimilate what you have read, is a pointless exercise. It's like in the ironic statement of Franz Kafka: “Life distracts our attention all the time; and we don’t even have time to notice why exactly.”

Look to the root

One of the basic reasons for low reading speed is the inability to highlight the main thing. What is your favorite book? Can you summarize her idea in one sentence? And the idea of a recently watched movie? If there are difficulties with this simple task, then working on the ability to highlight the main thing is another area of your growth. The ability to formulate thoughts can be developed by training logic and ingenuity. nine0003

Prepare a vertical strip (3-4 cm wide to start with) from any non-translucent material (preferably plain, so that the picture or text does not distract from reading). Take any unfamiliar text, cover it with this strip and read, trying to understand the logic. When it becomes easy to assimilate a text with such a percentage of closed text, the width of the strip can be increased. The skill of highlighting the main thing is perfectly worked out by taking notes. If you are a student, you have a suitable field for training, and if you don’t already, then you can practice on a brief retelling of what you heard at a meeting, taking notes on articles or books you read. To develop logic, notes can be made in the form of diagrams. Processing text into diagrams perfectly develops systemic thinking and helps to see the big picture. nine0003

Beginners are often advised on the zeroing method. Ushakov's explanatory dictionary explains the word "shooting" as "trial shooting to determine the distance to the target and establish the correct sight. " This is exactly what is required to be done with the book. Open any page of an unfamiliar book (popular science texts are ideal for this exercise). Look at the text for 30 seconds, then close it and try to imagine the three facts that you remember. Visualize them and think about what is missing, what information you would like to learn the next time you access the text. Repeat this a few more times, each time you refer to the text, noting something new (as a result, at least 10 interconnected facts about what you read should remain in your head). This exercise teaches the so-called skimming reading, as it develops the ability to quickly search for the main ideas in the text. In addition, the skill of highlighting the main thing can be extremely useful already at the stage of choosing material for reading. Since modern texts are redundant not only in qualitative but also in quantitative manifestation, choosing the right book that best suits your task can significantly reduce the time spent on studying the subject. nine0003

The presence of a goal directly affects the speed of reading, as it determines the degree of your interest. A predetermined task and expected result help to make reading more effective. For those who need the skill of speed reading for professional purposes - for reviews of highly specialized literature or for quickly mastering new areas - a working dictionary will be a good help. Our brain stops at unfamiliar words, and this stops the process. If you are a microbiologist and you need to quickly dive into, say, geodesy issues, then relying on general erudition is probably quite bold. Compiling a basic dictionary and memorizing the main words will help you master large amounts of information in the shortest possible time and significantly increase your reading speed. nine0003

So speed reading is a skill that can be developed. But at the same time, it is very important to realize that the whole bunch is necessary for efficiency: speed - understanding - memorization. Therefore, it is valuable not only and not so much the knowledge of specific methods of speed reading, but the understanding of the reasons for slow reading and the habits that prevent increasing speed. At the same time, it is not necessary to place an equally strong emphasis on all skills at once: Maxim Gorky, for example, looked through books extremely quickly, perfectly mastering the technique of reading diagonally (and having a developed ability to highlight the main thing even with a cursory glance), Theodore Roosevelt read in large blocks, covering two sentences at a time (because he had developed peripheral vision), Honore de Balzac fixed his eyes on the whole paragraph at all, managing to restore the meaning of the text in one or two words (due to surprisingly developed ingenuity), and Pushkin could retell biographies after reading them almost verbatim (which was the result of both a huge vocabulary and a well-developed memory). nine0003

These exercises can be done as a morning workout. Daily exercise for the brain has a positive effect on many areas of life, positively affecting the quality of thinking. The Guardian recently published a study showing that readers live longer and that reading is a “survival benefit.” Speed reading specialist Irina Lando claims that "reading speed is equal to the speed of thinking." And understanding that speed reading is synonymous with speed thinking increases the motivation to develop this skill, doesn't it? nine0003

Irina Lando

Doctor of Science in Management, specialty - knowledge management (knowledge management)

I'll start with the fact that a person cannot read faster than he thinks. The reason for slow reading is often slow thinking, it is in this case that we can observe how a person's lips move while reading.

I cannot agree with the statement that the quality of reading decreases at high speed. This happens to those who try to run through the text faster than their brain can comprehend what they read. Let's use logic. When your attention increases: when information is presented quickly or slowly? In which case will you better understand what you read: if you read with more attention or with less? When reading fast, the brain is forced to process information at a higher speed, so attention increases. Another thing is that the speed of reading cannot exceed the speed of the reader's thinking. Therefore, the first limiter is the speed with which a person can process text information, and the second is the number of words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs that the reader is able to see in the text. nine0003

Those who have the skill of speed reading do not read any literature quickly at all. They choose the speed of reading depending on the complexity of the text and the purpose of reading. One and the same book can be read for different purposes and, accordingly, at different speeds. The speed of reading fiction will depend on the speed at which the reader's brain is able to recode the text into a film. Quite a lot of people can understand fiction in paragraphs. Not only grasping the essence, but having time to feel what is happening. It depends on whether you read with a child in childhood. This is great for developing imaginative thinking. nine0003

Adults, on the other hand, are increasingly faced with the problem of functional illiteracy: they know letters, they can read, but they cannot understand what they read. With the advent of the Internet, new habits also arose: not reading to the end, grabbing information in parts, and so on. Many people get used to the fact that, having snatched some pieces from the text, the rest can be thought out by yourself. This can be done, for example, by a university professor, reading term papers of first-year students in their specialty. But the same first-year students will not be able to piece together the texts from the fourth-year textbook and tell the subject, thinking it out. nine0003

What can I recommend? First, read! Reading is a practical skill. Those who read a lot do it quickly. Find books that you will be interested in reading; when you want to know how it all ends. While you are reading, your brain is learning to recode little black squiggles off a piece of paper into images, paintings, films. Secondly, when reading complex literature that you have to think about for a long time, think about each phrase (for example, philosophical works), dilute it with reading light literature, on which you can accelerate. It is better if it is a story, not a short story. An experienced reader follows the course of the author's thoughts, highlighting the main idea and linking the rest of the details of the story with it. An inexperienced reader is betrayed by the inability to distinguish the main from the secondary, when only a particular example is retold instead of the essence. nine0003

It is also important to understand that reading and listening to books are completely different processes and different tasks for our brain. When listening to audiobooks, the temporal lobes work, and when reading, the posterior lobes work.