Hello! I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy during the quarantine. Today I wanted to share some tips and tricks for teaching sight words to early elementary students. I am writing this from a classroom standpoint, but if you are reading this as a parent, you can certainly take the ideas and use them for your child.

In our school we teach the Fountas and Pinnell high frequency words. There are 25 words in kindergarten, 50 words in first grade and 100 in second grade. If a kindergarten student masters their word list before the end of the year, I will start to teach them the first grade word list. These high frequency words are important to teach students because they appear often in the leveled books they will be reading. If students are able to recognize some words, they can focus on sounding out the words they don’t know and still have some understanding of the text.

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1. Introduce Each Sight Word

I like to introduce 2 sight words a week. We discuss how many letters the word has and how many of those letters are consonants /vowels. I also ask students to use the word in a sentence. If a word has more than one spelling (for, four) we discuss any misuse of the word as it comes up. While flashcards aren’t my favorite, I do use them for a quick, daily practice the sight words we have already learned.