What does sight words mean

What Are Sight Words? Get the Definition Plus Teaching Resources

When you’re a new teacher, the number of buzzwords that you have to master seems overwhelming at times. You’ve probably heard about many concepts, but you may not be entirely sure what they are or how to use them in your classroom. For example, new teacher Katy B. asks, “This seems like a really basic question, but what are sight words, and where do I find them?” No worries, Katy. We have you covered!

What’s the difference between sight words and high-frequency words?

Oftentimes we use the terms sight words and high-frequency words interchangeably. Opinions differ, but our research shows that there is a difference. High-frequency words are words that are most commonly found in written language. Although some fit standard phonetic patterns, some do not. Sight words are a subset of high-frequency words that do not fit standard phonetic patterns and are therefore not easily decoded. 

We use both types of words consistently in spoken and written language, and they also appear in books, including textbooks, and stories. Once students learn to quickly recognize these words, reading comes more easily.

What are sight words and how can I teach my students to memorize them?

Sight words are words like come, does, or who that do not follow the rules of spelling or the six types of syllables. Decoding these words can be very difficult for young learners. The common practice has been to teach students to memorize these words as a whole, by sight, so that they can recognize them immediately (within three seconds) and read them without having to use decoding skills.

Can I teach sight words using the science of reading?

On the other hand, recent findings based on the science of reading suggests we can use strategies beyond rote memorization. According to the the science of reading, it is possible to sound out many sight words because they have recognizable patterns. Literacy specialist Susan Jones, a proponent of using the science of reading to teach sight words, recommends a method called phoneme-grapheme mapping where students first map out the sounds they hear in a word and then add graphemes (letters) they hear for each sound.

How else can I teach sight words?

There are many fun and engaging ways to teach sight words. Dozens of books on the subject have been published, including the much-revered Comprehensive Phonics, Spelling, and Word Study Guide by Fountas & Pinnell. Also, resources like games, manipulatives, and flash cards are readily available online and in stores. To help get you started, check out these Creative and Simple Sight Word Activities for the Classroom. Also, check out Susan Jones Teaching for three science-of-reading-based ideas and more.

Where do I find sight word lists?

Two of the most popular sources are the Dolch High Frequency Words list and the Fry High Frequency Words list.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Dr. Edward Dolch developed his word list, used for pre-K through third grade, by studying the most frequently occurring words in the children’s books of that era. The list has 200 “service words” and also 95 high-frequency nouns. The Dolch word list comprises 80 percent of the words you would find in a typical children’s book and 50 percent of the words found in writing for adults.

Dr. Edward Fry developed an expanded word list for grades 1–10 in the 1950s (updated in 1980), based on the most common words that appear in reading materials used in grades 3–9. The Fry list contains the most common 1,000 words in the English language. The Fry words include 90 percent of the words found in a typical book, newspaper, or website.

Looking for more sight word activities? Check out 20 Fun Phonics Activities and Games for Early Readers.

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Sight words vs. High frequency words: What's the difference?

PSPKK123October 27, 2021 •  7 Comments

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Sight words vs. high frequency words. What’s the difference? This is the beginning of our blog series all about sight words.

Traditionally, when teachers say “sight words,” they are referring to high frequency words that children should know by sight.

We often define sight words as words that kids can’t sound out – words like the, for example.

But this definition is not correct. While sight words may be irregular, the definition of sight words is NOT words that kids can’t sound out.

Reading researchers have a different definition of sight words.

A sight word is a word that is instantly and effortlessly recalled from memory, regardless of whether it is phonically regular or irregular. A sight-word vocabulary refers to the pool of words a student can effortlessly recognize.

David A. Kilpatrick, PhD

As an adult, most of the words you encounter are sight words, because unless you’re reading from a challenging textbook or a technical manual, you know the words automatically. You don’t need to sound them out.

High frequency words are the words that are most commonly used in the English language. These words may be regular (as in and) or irregular (as in the).

It’s essential that students develop automaticity as they read, and one way to do this is to help them read many high frequency words by sight.

We want our students to recognize high frequency words instantly. But the way we do this isn’t by giving them stacks of words to memorize.

Will students memorize some high frequency words?

Yes, at first.

They’ll memorize their names and a few other words like Dad and Mom.

And there’s nothing wrong with teaching pre-readers a small set of sight words before they begin reading. In their article, A New Model for Teaching High Frequency Words, Linda Farrell, Tina Osenga, and Michael Hunter recommend teaching the following sight words to new readers:

• the
• a
• I
• to
• and
• was
• for
• you
• is
• of

We can teach these words to students after they know letter names but before they’ve begun phonics instruction.

However.

This is just to get them started.

There’s a problem with the common practice of sending home lists of words for students to memorize. “While this method works for many students, it is an abysmal failure with others.” (A New Model for Teaching High Frequency Words, by Farrell, Osenga and Hunter).

Rather, we should integrate high frequency word instruction into phonics lessons whenever possible.

More on that in a minute. First …

Some educators refer to decodable high frequency words as “flash words.” These words appear so frequently that students should be able to read them in a flash.

Irregular high frequency words are sometimes called “heart words” because there are parts of the word that can’t be sounded out; students must learn those parts “by heart.”

Be leery of any reading program that says students need to “just memorize” irregular words.

Rather, look for a program that organizes high frequency words to fit phonics lessons wherever possible.

In other words, teach the word can when students know the sounds of c, a, and n.

Even with irregular words (“heart words”) we can all attention to the part of the word that IS regular.

Really Great Reading has some excellent instructional videos to help you teach those tricky heart words.

Find all of Really Great Reading’s “heart word magic” videos here.

Yes. High frequency words are the glue that hold decodable sentences together. We want students to know some of these words so the decodable books they read make sense.

Because of that, we’ll teach a small number of sight words to pre-readers, and additional words as needed so our students can read their decodable books.

But let’s let go of this idea that students need to memorize lists and lists of sight words.

Turn high frequency words into sight words with these engaging mats!

High Frequency Word Practice Mats – 240 words!

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Students will count the sounds in words, spell them, read them in context, and more! What a meaningful, multi-sensory way to master high frequency words!

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Stay tuned for the rest of this series!

 Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9

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Filed Under: General, Sight words, Science of reading, Structured literacy Tagged With: first grade, second grade, third grade, kindergarten, Pre-K

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These eyes are opposite. What goes on in our heads when our eyes meet?

May 30, 2021

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Eyes have long been called the mirror of the soul, and when one soul looks into another, interesting, sometimes very strange things happen.

We often see scenes like this in movies: two people, usually a man and a woman, meet eyes in a crowded room, and something immediately happens between them, like a spark jumps.

As scientists have found out, other people's eyes, on the contrary, provoke unconscious reactions in the brain - interesting and sometimes inexplicable.

Five years ago, this news was reprinted by many publications: the Italian psychologist Giovanni Caputo set up a simple experiment where participants stared into each other's eyes for 10 minutes while in a dimly lit room. At the same time, in the other group, the control group, the participants simply sat in front of an empty wall.

The result was amazing: 10 minutes of "staring" led to the fact that people began to experience a state of dissociation, that is, perceive what is happening to them as if it is happening to someone else.

In the face of the person sitting opposite, the participants saw either their own face, or the face of a relative, or even some kind of monster. At the same time, all the sounds around seemed to be muffled, and the color scheme of the room became black and white.

Participants who sat for 10 minutes staring at a wall did not experience any of this.

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What can I say, you yourself have probably experienced a similar strange state when you suddenly collided with the eyes of another person: the realization that you and he are looking at each other and both understand it, produces interesting effect. This is how love stories sometimes begin.

But, of course, eye contact does not always mean mutual sympathy that develops into a serious feeling. After all, such contact is an integral and natural part of a normal conversation or business negotiation. However, this is almost always the important part.

We judge a person, what he is, including whether he looks us straight in the eye or tries to look away when we talk to him.

And when we meet strangers on the street and they pass by without even looking at us, we may have an unpleasant feeling that we are being avoided.

This is our household experience. But psychologists and neuroscientists have been studying eye contact for decades, and the results of their research are quite intriguing. It turns out that such eye-to-eye contact has a power that affects our thoughts, our perception of another person looking at us.

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It has long been noticed, and experiments confirm this, that someone else's gaze attracts our attention and captures it. At the same time, we begin to be less aware of what is happening around, everything seems to be immersed in gray tones (like in a movie!).

The gaze of another immediately sets off a series of processes in our brain as we become aware that we are now confronted with the mind of a person looking into our eyes. As a result, it becomes clearer to us that this other person has his own interests, his own agenda, and this makes us wary.

If you have ever stood in a zoo near a cage with great apes and stumbled upon their eyes, you know this strange, even slightly frightening feeling: the monkey seems to be judging you, watching you, seeing right through you.

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Look into the eyes of a gorilla and you will immediately feel that a representative of another mind is looking at you

In fact, even picturesque portraits trigger similar processes in our brains when the person depicted on them a person looks directly into our eyes (recall the Mona Lisa effect). Social contact with a portrait? Why not.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the moment when we realize that we have become someone's subject of study has a very distracting effect on us, prevents us from gathering our thoughts, concentrating on a matter, even on the simplest, confusing. Moreover, not even a living person in front of us can interfere, but a video image on the screen.

Similar studies have also shown that the gaze of another person that we intercept can affect our working memory (the ability to retain and use information in a short period of time), our imagination, and our ability to suppress information we do not need.

You have most likely experienced all of these effects without realizing it when you break eye contact with a person in order to better focus on your thoughts or on your presentation.

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Research shows that looking directly into the eyes grabs our attention.

Some psychologists even advise looking away when asking children questions, because they think that way they can better focus on the answers.

In addition, studies show that eye contact affects how we perceive our counterpart. For example, we usually consider someone who doesn't avoid our gaze and often looks us straight in the eye to be smarter, more honest, and more sincere (at least that's the case in Western culture). And we tend to trust more what such people say.

But, of course, too much eye contact can make us uncomfortable, and people who stare straight into our eyes can even cause fear.

In one of the studies, psychologists tried to establish the most comfortable duration of eye contact and came to the conclusion that on average it is 3 seconds (and none of the participants in the experiment would like such contact to exceed 9 seconds).

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The moment we discover that someone is looking directly into our eyes can be very discouraging and distracting at the very least. human when we find them in a room full of people. According to one recent study, at such a moment there is something like a merger of two personalities: we tend to consider the one who found our eyes similar to himself - both externally and as a person.

And when everyone around you is talking animatedly, not paying attention to anything, this effect adds intimacy to your meeting of eyes. But that's not all.

If you continue your eye contact and approach your counterpart, it may seem that your pupils also seem to expand in sync with the pupils of the other person, as if adjusting to each other. Some sort of social mimicry? And at the same time so romantic.

However, scientists express a certain skepticism about this behavior of the pupils, believing that the pupils simply react to the changing brightness in the partner's eyes (for example, when the pupils of a person opposite dilate, his eyes darken). The theory is, of course, interesting. ..

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Even if we look into the eyes of a portrait, our brain will respond to a social signal. Perhaps that is why the faces of people with dilated pupils seem more attractive to many - at least our brain responds to this as well.

At one time, ladies even instilled the juice of poisonous belladonna berries into their eyes, which caused the pupils to dilate, making the look bottomless (and leading to hallucinations and visual impairments).

But not only the pupils send us signals when we look into the eyes of a person. Recent studies have shown that we can read a lot of emotions from the movement of our eyes.

A person can open his eyes wide or narrow them. Disgust, for example, causes us to narrow our eyes, which gives our face a well-defined expression and signals to those around us: "Uuuuu ... How disgusting."

Another important element of our eyes is the limbal rings (dark rings around the iris, the colored part of the eye).

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