#Sight words first grade phonics how to#

The word wall list, if needed, should be minimal. Of the Dolch sight word list, only 82 total words are not fully decodable. When you implement a sound wall you are not creating a word wall, but rather a tool that helps students with the skills needed for decoding and encoding.Īpproximately 80% of high-frequency words are fully decodable and there’s another large percentage of words that are decodable except for 1 phoneme. Personally, I don’t think you should post them on the sound wall.

#Sight words first grade phonics how to#

Today I’m excited to continue the conversation about Heart Words and move on to explain to you how to use the Heart Word method with your students. In my last post I explained Orthographic Mapping, the mental process used to store and remember words, and answered the question “What are Heart Words?“. Something else is going on and it is called Orthographic Mapping. They discovered that reading is NOT like visual memory. In recent years, reading experts and cognitive scientists have begun to look more closely into how we learn to read.

There has always been far too many students who struggle to remember new words, and now science is helping us understand why. While it worked for some, we know it didn’t work for all. In this post, I explain how to teach high-frequency sight words using the Heart Word method and share my Heart Words resource and activities to help kindergarten, first and second grade students learn sight words.įor many years we taught students their sight words through rote memorization. We thought if a student saw a word enough times, it would eventually stick and they’d know it.