How to Teach Sight Words - Science of Reading // sight word activities for struggling readers

[Music] hey everyone in today's video we are going to learn three fun and easy activities that you can do with your students to teach them sight words now there has been a lot of professional discussion in the education world about the way we used to teach sight words and how we would do a lot of skill and drill and just teach rote memorization and while that worked for some of our students the efficacy of those strategies has come into question a lot over the years so in today's video i'm going to share three sight word activities that align with all the research behind the science of reading the three activities i'm going to share today are pretty simple to use and as a teacher you should be able to watch this video get a quick idea of how it works and use it in your classroom right away so before i dive into this video let me remind you my name is susan jones i am a former k-2 literacy teacher and first grade teacher who now spends a lot of time here on youtube sharing tips ideas activities and freebies with teachers just like you i go ahead and upload a video every thursday and every sunday morning so while you are here be sure to subscribe to my channel click that bell and give this video a like now let's dive in before i share activity number one i want to talk real quick about sight words now for the longest time myself included teachers thought that sight words were you know high frequency words that we needed to know in a snap and without even thinking much about it i just naturally assumed because of things i've heard before that most of our sight words are have different sounds like you can't sound them out so you just have to memorize and know them in a snap but that's actually not true first it's way more difficult for students to learn whole word memorization instead of just learning the sound correspondences to each of the letters in the word in fact david kilpatrick shares that when the student is memorizing a new sight word and it becomes a sight word because they don't have to sound it out anymore what they've done is they haven't looked at the whole word as a whole they've actually just memorized the sequence of letters that they see in that word and that has kind of registered to them as knowing what the word is so when we say sight word in this video we can definitely talk about those high frequency words that we know from dolce and frye but here any word that you know by sight is actually a sight word so we're going to put a little twist on those high frequency words and we're going to teach students how to use phoneme mapping as your first activity so when we're using phoneme mapping what we're doing is we're really making a connection between the phonemes the sounds and the letters that students see when they look at the word now like i mentioned earlier i had this kind of old school thought that you know high frequency words you couldn't sound them out that's why students needed to memorize them as a whole word but like i said that's not actually true let's just take a quick look at some of the dolce words and here are some regularly spelled sight words we have the word think when how just and with now as you can see some of these have digraphs they have some consonant blends they have some diphthongs but all of these patterns are things that we actually teach to our students throughout the year so with these regularly spelled words we are just going to actually teach students to read them and memorize them and write them the same way we would with any regular word so here's a little example of how i would teach these regularly spelled high frequency words to my students so that way they become sight words okay so when we are phony mapping a new sight word you will show students the word and you'll have them say it out loud so think then you want students to segment the phonemes they hear within the word so we have they'll know it's four different phonemes that they're hearing now they need to figure out which graphemes are making those phonemes and again you are doing this with the student so they can see you do this so think we have is the th together and think here's another one we would do it with the word with so i would tell students this is the word with we might see this a lot now students might be able to just go ahead and sound this out if they came across it just like think but we can still go ahead and if we're introducing these new high frequency words or you're following a list you can still have them do this activity so with let's find the phonemes this has three let's figure out what those are three different phonemes so we're kind of identifying the graphemes that make the phoneme once you've shown students their new sight words that they will be learning and you've kind of mapped them out a little bit then i would go ahead and extend this further by having them use some sound boxes now when doing an activity like this one i would go ahead and give them a sheet that has either three or four sometimes you might need two or five depending on the words you'll know and students will each have their own sound box sheet you will go ahead and say okay we're going to do the word think and students will have to first figure out which sound box they need so think okay it has four then i go ahead and have them use play-doh to fill in each of the boxes [Music] and what they'll do here is this just adds a little multi-sensory approach to them actually thinking of the phonemes that they hear and as they say it they'll say push it down and then they can go ahead and do that one more time and actually write the graphemes that match each phoneme so th think not only does this activity give them this sensory approach but it also lets them see how the graphemes are separated based on the phoneme that they represent and of course if you don't want to use play-doh you could just use counters and have them move it up you could use little cubes bears anything for students to physically put their hands on to give them a little hands-on practice with these words so now you might be wondering that sounds great susan but what about those words like said or some those words that are irregularly spelled well we can still use phoneme mapping and i'm going to show you how to do just that okay now for those words that are irregular like the word said we're going to go ahead and write that out and introduce it to our students now in the past this would definitely be a word that i would have said guys you can't sound this out so you're just gonna have to look at it and memorize it but now that we know the science behind the fact that students can learn quicker if they're just thinking about the individual phonemes in the word when i look at this there's definitely two phonemes that they will know so go ahead and introduce the word said just like we did with think and with they'll say it aloud said and they'll still go ahead and segment the phonemes so i hear s three different phonemes let's see what they are we know s i hear n that usually sounds like e but i don't see any e here so what about this last one here's d so a i here must make that middle f sound in the word said so here students don't need to actually memorize the entire portion of this word instead they only have to remember this irregular spelling here of e so you can do a heart here this is called heart word strategy and i did not make this up i will link the really great reading article i found about this but here when students see this and they'll really physically draw a little heart here they know oh wait a second this is a funky spelling it's an irregular spelling e and they will just have to memorize when they see the s here and the d here and this a i in the middle it actually makes that e sound so if you had a list of words they would know oh okay these ones that i'm doing if they're actually watching themselves physically uh map out the different phonemes they'll know okay these ones are all regular i can go ahead and do that this one oh here's a heart here i know that that does not say ah it doesn't say a it says something different you still bring in the sound boxes with these irregular words too and you do it the same exact way okay we need three play-doh balls let's go ahead and map that out eh that first one i know is that's our heart word our heart part so we can put a little heart here and d all right activity number two falls under an umbrella of activities and that is to teach sight words using a multi-sensory approach research has shown for a long time that students learn best when they are using different multi-sensory approaches they're able to use different parts of their brain they're able to use the four modalities and they just really get to understand and use their different senses to make sense of what they are learning some ways you could do this are by using an activity like sky writing so after you have explained what the sight word is you've done a little phony mapping you could have students practice by taking their arm putting it out and writing the word in the sky let's say the word is the they might say the t h e i think that e was backwards let me try it make it your way e there we go another way you could do this is by using these little finger lights they look like this i loved these when i would do small group pull out for my literacy groups when i was a literacy teacher and for sight words what you could do is you could turn off the light so you could do this with your whole class you could turn off the lights and then say the word out loud have them say it have them separate those phonemes and then go ahead and write it on their desks using that little flashlight using shaving cream on a cookie sheet or on your desks is a popular one looks like that and now just remember as you're doing any of these multi-sensory activities you want to make sure that you are still emphasizing that sound letter connection you still want students to be able to think about the phonemes they're hearing in each of these high frequency words before they are just remembering each little letter and lastly something almost every primary teacher has in their classroom you can use magnets now as a quick little aside when you're using those magnets something i like to do in front of my classroom is after i've already taught the word let's say the word is some what i will do is i will have students kind of close their eyes or maybe i will flip the white board if i'm doing it if i can hide it and after they've kind of looked at that word they've seen it i might either switch a couple letters or just remove a letter and then ask them what is wrong this activity lets students think wait a second i just saw that word i know that word says sum it was s-o-m-e she switched the e and the m and they're able to kind of make a lot of sense about the letters and the sounds that they're hearing when they're looking at that and they can share with you what was wrong in that sight word naturally i would only do that activity to further their progression in learning that sight word for instance i wouldn't just throw up s-o-e-m and be like this word does not say some something's wrong here you want to actually teach them how to you know use a phoneme mapping to figure that word out first maybe have them try a few other modalities in terms of making that word and then you can challenge them with mixing it up or removing a letter and one more multi-sensory approach would be to use a song a popular tune like b-i-n-g-o or like farmer in the dell and teach students how to spell that word to go along to that tune that is again not the way i would originally teach the word but it's just another approach to help strengthen that understanding and again just add to the multi-sensory approach of that word all right activity number three all right sight word activity number three is to have students compare sort and match different sight words by sound now to have students learn how to do this i would definitely start off whole group by having students just compare the different sounds they see in the sight words an example might look like this okay so here we're gonna have students go ahead and compare the sounds in each word and when i'm teaching them this i just picked six words here from the dolch first grade sight word list so even if you have to teach words from a list you can go ahead and do that with these now here are six of them and i found some words that have beginning sounds that match i found words that have ending sounds that match and that have middle sounds that match as well so after we've gone ahead and learned these words each week maybe we've done some of our other activities already i'm going to have students compare and contrast these words so i will ask them to look at the different phonemes in the words and think about which ones match are there any other words on here that have the same beginning sound and him and had we could look at the middle sound here's another one and i would absolutely have them go ahead and say that out loud so they know it's not live in this case we also have e over here so here those two could match and let's see if any have the same ending sound we have and we have this m again so we have from and him that also match over here we also have let and live with that same beginning sound now i just went ahead and modeled all of the matches for you when doing this with the class i would go ahead and model maybe one or two and then i would give them some think time to go ahead and segment those words and see if they can also identify any matches with either the beginning the middle or the end sound once students have run through something like that a few times you could have them cut out their own sight words that they are reviewing that week or learning some new ones and you can have them go ahead and sort the sight words by whatever sounds they hear there's really no right or wrong to this as long as you know the sounds actually match but they can choose to look for the beginning sound the final sound the middle sound however they want to go ahead and sort or match those words you can also have students cut out different cards and play memory or concentration by sound so instead of flipping it over and trying to find a match with and with they might flip over with and they might flip over when and they have the same beginning sound even though it's spelled differently but that sound is the same and that could be a match as i'm sure you noticed with all three of these activities the main teaching point when teaching these different sight words is for students to hear the phonemes in the word first and then find the graphemes that match scientifically speaking students are able to recognize and memorize that word much faster for it to become a sight word when they are able to quickly locate the grapheme and phoneme connection that they're seeing and then they will automatically memorize that word instead of looking at the word as a whole so with each of these activities that is what we really are having students practice and of course the faster students gain more sight words the faster they are able to read and become more fluent in their reading so i hope you got to see a different take on sight words than maybe a way you are used to teaching them in the past it's always important to keep our professional development growing and trying to learn new things that will best help the students in our classrooms so if you did enjoy this video or picked up a new little tip please go ahead and like this video by giving it a big thumbs up and make sure you go ahead and leave a comment let me know if any of this is new to you or if this is what you've always done in the past or if there's any other questions you might have surrounding this topic i'll see you all in the next one bye [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Susan Jones Teaching

Views: 276,367

Rating: 4.934073 out of 5

Keywords: teaching sight words, sight words kindergarten, how to teach sight words, sight words, teaching sight words kindergarten, sight word activities, sight words science of reading, science of reading, science of reading sight words, teaching sight words 1st grade, phoneme grapheme mapping, teaching sight words in a fun way, teaching sight words to dyslexic students

Id: dRuuvC-vmU4

Length: 17min 45sec (1065 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 18 2021