Charlotte advocated starting when the child was six years old but acknowledged that each child is unique. Once your child can read several dozen words from those activities, it’s time to start actual reading lessons. At sight words series#They can just read them.Up to this point in our series on teaching your child to read, we have been talking about informal play activities. But kids who know the Secrets don’t have to memorize sight words. Most often, it is the learners who need the most “use-it” time who get the least, marking the beginning of what quickly emerges as an “un-level playing field” for struggling readers. Kids who can seem to be learning to read can suddenly hit a wall in second grade or third grade when the brain’s finite storage for memorized words runs out. In deciding what to remember, our brains ask “Do I need this?… Does it make sense?” If not, the information is relegated to the “use it or lose it” system, for which every learner has a unique threshold for how many times they must use a skill so as not to lose it. Without a concept of word or alphabetic insight, children will have the mistaken impression that words are unsystematic, making learning not only inefficient (Duke, 2016), but in total opposition with how our brains learn best, which is patterning.Īdditionally, rote memorization requires brain storage, which is not limitless. At sight words how to#Instructional emphasis at the earliest grade levels is on memorizing random letter sequences, rather than learning how to decode easily decodable text. Before beginning learners even understand the alphabetic principle they are “calling” words. “Typically, the first 100 high frequency aren’t mastered by most kids until Thanksgiving or so of first grade… and that is with considerable effort.” -Dr.Tim Shanahanįor example, some children do not even have a concept of a word or understanding of the word boundaries in print and how these map to letters, and yet they are memorizing letter sequences in “sight words.”Īdditionally, a great deal of sight word instruction occurs before children even have a concept of how letters actually come together to make words. At sight words code#This is far too long to make learners wait for the whole code (Allington, 2016). While many of the listed pre-primer and primer words are easily decodable with letters making sounds that beginning readers would expect, those that are highlighted contain Secrets, which when taught traditionally as phonics “rules” span three to four grade level years to learn. Secret Stories® “feeds” the brain’s hunger for patterns when learning to read. make sense of) “behaviors” than abstract phonics patterns. Knowing the “secrets” about letters’ behavior allows beginning and struggling readers to easily predict their most and next most likely sounds in unknown words, just as they would the behavior of their friends and classmates. Developmentally, it is much easier for very young learners to pattern-out (i.e. Secret Stories® feeds the brain’s natural inclination to seek patterns when learning to read by aligning patterns of letter behavior to patterns of kid behavior. At sight words full#Simply put, patterning is the brain’s way of doing things… and Secret Stories® takes full advantage of this. The brain is often referred to as the ultimate pattern-making machine, seeking and storing memories based on patterns, or repeated relationships between ideas. “Quite apart from anything the teacher does… the student, being human, is a pattern finder, and a pattern maker…” - Dr. Rote memorization is not only developmentally inappropriate for early grade learners, but requires a vast amount of instructional time, energy and resources (assistant and volunteer time, activities, material, etc.) It is also far from ideal from a brain based learning perspective. This study, however, may seem of little value to those teaching without the Secrets in early grade classrooms, where overreliance on sight words is far too frequent, due to early learners’ gross lack of skills in comparison to the required text level assessments. To compensate, beginning readers must memorize hundreds of sight words before the end of second grade, often forcing teachers to prioritize teaching the “reading” over teaching the reader.īeginning grade learners own so little of the alphabetic code that it’s virtually impossible for them to make sense of the many different sounds that letters make when they come together in words. To compensate, teachers will often rely on the rote memorization of sight words to help students “read.” Knowing the Secrets empowers kids to decode approximately 95% of the most commonly memorized sight words by applying what they know about letter behavior to predict their most likely sounds.
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