Every Word Wants to be a Sight Word When it Grows Up

As a kindergarten teacher, each year I would send home an anonymous guardian survey. (Glutton for punishment? Perhaps) Many years ago I had a parent say something along the lines of this: My son and I are both confused by sight words. It seems like some can be sounded out, some can't and you send them home on the same list. So, I don't know what to tell him to do when he sees one in a book. It is frustrating for both of us and as a result he doesn't like reading at home.

Not to be dramatic, but since I tend to be dramatic, it felt like a knife in my heart and I would like to welcome you to my internal dialogue upon reading this feedback! 

"Wait! What? Yes, that's true! It's confusing! Are all my students confused? I am a horrible teacher! Why haven't I thought more deeply about this?  This parent is more reflective than me. Maybe I should teach yoga full time. Teaching is so hard. Why would I teach can and they the same way? Seriously? Reading at home was frustrating for him...I want him to love to read." And on...and on...and on. I know you get it. When that negative self talk is so loud you can't shut it out. After a sufficient pity party, I decided to learn more about these elusive "sight words."


Thankfully, how to teach these words has been throughly studied and the research is making it's way into the classroom. But first, let's explore what is a sight word? Some times when I hear the term "sight word" used, I am reminded of the scene in the classic movie The Princess Bride when Vizzini repeatedly describes events as "inconceivable." To which Indigo replies, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Before we dive into how to teach these words, lets be sure that you think it means what I think it means.  

A sight word is any word that can be immediate recognized by sight regardless of its regular or irregular spelling. The term sight vocabulary (or orthographic lexicon if we are feeling fancy) is a person's bank of words that can be effortlessly recognized. 

A high frequency word (HFW) is often what teachers mean when we say sight word, but the distinction is useful. High frequency words are simply those that occur most often in English texts. Dolch and Fry and are the two most common lists of these words. 

Within the high frequency word category are both regular and irregular words. Regular high frequency words are those that follow a predictable phoneme-grapheme (sound-symbol) relationship or pattern. Words such as can, in, and it fit this category. 

Irregular high frequency words are words that again, are highly common, but do not follow the predicable phoneme-grapheme patterns. Of, was, are and they reside in this category and as we all know, these words are troublesome for budding readers and writers. 

How to Teach High Frequency Words

Instead of teaching students to memorize words as unanalyzed wholes, we can support students in analyzing the sound structure of words and align those sounds with letter sequences. Through this process called orthographic mapping, these irregular high frequency words become sight words (Kilpatrick, 2015),

This definition is from Essentials for Assessing, Preventing,
and Overcoming Reading Difficulties by David A. Kilpatrick (page 81).

I attended the Plain Talk conference in New Orlean this past week and was honored to hear Dr. Kilpatrick present. He shared a wealth of research, theories and background in support of orthographic mapping. We do not learn these HFWs as units or by sight or the same way we memorize letter names. Just when I thought my brain would explode, he demonstrated how to orthographically map the word said. And guess what? It took about 2 minutes and was quite straightforward! So here is basically how it went. 


In the following example: 
T stands for teacher
Ss stands for students
A letter between slash marks means the sound a letter represents, not the letter name. For example, /m/ means saying mmmm not the name of the letter M. 


The teacher says the word (notice I did NOT say shows the word)
T: "Today we are going to learn the high frequency word said. This word is important to us  because we will use this word when we read and write. The word is said. What's the word?" (Kilpatrick did not state an objective, but it's a good practice so I threw it in.)
Ss: "said "
T: "Let's say the individual sounds in said."
Ss: "/s/ /e/ /d/"
T: "How many sounds did we hear?"
Ss: "3" 
T: Writes a box for each sound (Some Ts like to have printed Elkonin boxes ready to go. I am a minimalist so I write boxes on a white board.)

T: "What was the first sound in said?" 
Ss: "/s/"
T: "What letter do you think represents that sound?"
Ss: "The letter S" 
T: "Yes, in the word said, the /s/ is represented by the letter S."  Teacher writes an s in the first box.

T "What is the ending* sound in said?"
Ss: "/d/"
T "What letter represents that sound?"
Ss: "The letter D"
T: "Yes the /d/ sound is represented by the letter D." Teacher writes a d in the last box. 

*In chapter 6 of Kilpatrick's book Equipped for Reading Success, he suggests mapping out of order. He states, "If you do the analysis in order, you remove some of the phoneme analysis that will assist in the mapping process." (page 59)


T: "What is the middle sound or the vowel sound in said?" 
Ss: "/e/"
T: "What letter do you think represents the /e/ sound?"
Ss: "The letter E"
T: "It sounds like it would be the letter E, but in the word said the /e/ sound is written ai." Teacher writes ai in the middle box. 

T: "This word is irregular by one sound." Teacher writes the word said on the board. 
Practice together saying, "said, s-a-i-d" a few times. At this point the word can be added to a word wall, sound wall, or flash card bank for frequent review. 

Many of us have a name for these irregular words such as "outlaw words," "red words," "heart words," "rule breakers" and so on. I have used the first one, but now i think it would be even better if part of the analysis was to simply say, "This word is irregular by one sound." 

Here is why this important: about half of all English words can be spelled correctly by following the predicable phoneme-grapheme rules. An additional 36% are irregular by only one speech sound (usually a vowel). We often present writing and reading in English to our students as some sort of outlandish system when in reality only about 4% of printed words are truly irregular (LETRS, Unit 3 - Session 2). The HFWs one and of are in this 4% of words and as we introduce these words early, it often sends the incorrect message that words are less predictable than they realistically are. 

So there it is! This example is an irregular HFW but all words go through this same mental storage process in order to be automatically recognized upon sight. Through orthographic mapping all words can be sight words when they grow up!

Once these words have been mapped, retrieval practice (the process of deliberately recalling information) will solidify these words in long term memory. Here are a few ways to help these words stick. 

Additional Practice Ideas for High Frequency Words

Flash Card Review - Quick and frequent practice of HFWs provide students with the chance to retrieve these words from long term memory, increasing long term retention. 

Password - When my little monkeys came in the door every day they had to whisper the password in my ear. At the beginning of the year the password was a letter and then shifted to a HFW. It was so fun to hear the kids talking about words before they even came in the door. Talk about bell to bell learning! This routine also reminded me every day to kneel down, look each kiddo in the eye and welcome them to school. For that reason, I did not have the students tell each other the password. I kept this one for myself. 

Find in connected text and writing practice -  What do you do with all the predictable text floating around your classroom? Use for a HFW search! The tongue depressor in the image below has googly eyes glued to it. I had a whole bucket of these, some with 2 eyes and some with one big eye. I used them often to motivate students to practice one to one correspondence as they read, point to a phonics element or text feature. The kids LOVE these!

I Spy with my Googly Eye: 
(1) Look for the HFW in connected text and "say, spell, say" the word when it is found.  
(2) "Show that you see it!" (by using the stick as a place holder) 
(3) Walk to the board and write the word. 

Sentence Dictation - This one is my favorites and has huge benefits for students. I had the little humans write the HFW three times saying the name of each letter as they wrote. Then they practiced orally sharing sentences that use the word with a talking partner. Next, I chose a short sentence and dictated it to them. This is an ideal time to reinforce temporary spelling of unknown words, how to use the word wall/sound wall and sentence structure elements such as beginning with a capital letter, using finger spaces and ending with punctuation. 

If you want to deepen your orthographic mapping knowledge, Kilpatrick's work is the way to go. When my team told him how his work is changing our instruction, he so respectfully said, "It is the work of Linnea Ehri, I am just spreading the word."  His comment made me an even bigger fan! And I promise if you ever meet him, your face take on a similarly ridiculous, overly excited expression just like mine!

Skippy Frog or Skip the Frog?

My childhood home in Billings, Montana had a huge unfinished basement providing ample storage space and room for my sisters and I to roller skate year round. I do not have a basement; I have a crawl space. A pitch back, spider web infested, 4-foot-tall crawl space where my prized possessions from years as a kindergarten teacher have lived since I left the classroom a few years ago to be a literacy coach. Over these past years, I have slowly given away most of what I once considered “must keep in case I go back to the classroom” items. 

The oral language development and use
of graphic organizers for prewriting captured here
are both obviously important.
 Also, I love that stool my mama gave me!

A few containers labeled and organized remain in my personal dungeon: a classroom set of yoga mats, little baggies of items corresponding to each letter of the alphabet (which I painstaking gathered from junk drawers, swiping my children’s toys and countless trips to my local thrift store long before similar phonological awareness tubs could be commercially purchased), puppets and my watermelon stool.  

Kiddos ready for Yoga Friday

Recently, I needed some counters for a professional development I am leading on using manipulatives to support phonological awareness interventions and I knew just where to find some. I opened the hatch, lowered the ladder and climbed down with a flashlight gripped between my teeth. As I opened the tote, the flashlight fell from my mouth as I exclaimed, “What the hell?” Staring up at me in the dim light were Lips the Fish, Eagle Eye, Stretchy Snake, Chunky Monkey, Skippy Frog, Trying Lion and that darling Dolphin. 

Let me rewind 20ish years. My undergraduate Early Literacy course was taught by Dr. Kathleen Brown, the eventual founder and director of the University of Utah Reading Clinic. Thanks to her, I understood about top-down/bottom-up processing, explicit and systematic phonics instruction as well as distributed practice.  One class period, she literally made each of us raise a hand and swear to never teach the Letter of the Week format, warning us about the push back we would get from colleagues. 

I have been reflecting on my college years often in light of the exciting, and sometimes heated, national conversation regarding how well university education programs prepare teacher candidates for the classroom. I feel incredibly lucky to have gotten a solid foundation from my undergraduate work, but even that could not save me from getting sucked in by the cute faces of those beanie babies when I met them on Teachers Pay Teachers. During my first few years in the classroom, I knew I should be gathering the little humans around the rainbow table for some sort of guided reading/tier 2/small group/intervention type instruction, but had no idea what that should entail. In exchange for my hard earned $3, I printed and hung up these cards. 

I now know that these "strategies" represented by the beanie babies are based on the 3-cueing system, also called the psycholinguistic guessing game, and assumes that students use context and guessing in order to decode unknown words. The evidence from the Science of Reading suggests that this is not what occurs during skilled reading. These cues are slow, inefficient and encourage students to take their focus away from the act of decoding. These deceptive beanie babies actually represent the habits of struggling readers.

When we look at the Simple View of Reading, as presented by Gough and Tumner (1986), we see that reading comprehension is the product of decoding and language comprehension. When we understand the role of decoding in this way, it becomes vital to instruct students to decode in the way that will lead to automatic word recognition and consequently free up working memory for comprehension. 

 The Simple View of Reading: The product of Decoding and Language Comprehension is equal to
Reading Comprehension

I am relieved to say that I never really did a thorough job of teaching what each beanie was supposed to remind my budding readers to do. But unfortunately, I do clearly remember flying that stuffed eagle around the room telling my students to use picture cues.   

If you are interested in learning about the evidence that using Lips the Fish and the 3-cueing approach are not in the best interest of emergent readers, I have a few recommendations. First, read Assessing, Preventing and Overcoming Reading Difficulties by David Kilpatrick. Rightfully so, this book is currently taking the educational world by storm. The cognitive psychologist, Mark Seidenburg address these same topics brilliantly in his book Language at the Speed of Sight. His words on page 304 help to ease my mind when I think of students who had passed through my class while I was using this approach. The 3-cueing approach, Seidenburg writes, “didn’t develop because teachers lack integrity, commitment, motivation, sincerity or intelligence. It developed because they were poorly trained and advised.” Finally, the APM Reports podcast At a Loss For Words by Emily Hanford is part of a trilogy of reports that examine why so many students in America struggle to read. The one linked is the third in the trio and looks closely at this topic.  

This quote is becoming a bit cliché, but I don't care.
I still find it relevant as an important guiding belief. 

If you clicked on the blog because you currently use these confusing creatures and now your beanie baby bubble has burst, I have been there and I got you. We are educators at a time where knowledge, research and evidence-based practices are within our grasp. And it is ok, no it is admirable, for us teachers, coaches and administrators to change our minds. To look at our students, parents and communities and say, “I learned something new and now I will do better for every human who comes through that door.”  

Oh, what did I do with those darling stuffed creatures you wonder? They dove headfirst into the bin of Breathing Buddies! But that is another post...