

She will then be able to focus on other unfamiliar words without losing the meaning of the sentence as a whole as she reads.
#Meaning sight words free#
Learning to recognize smaller, more frequently used words without having to think them through, will free her to move quickly through a new sentence. If she has to stop and puzzle them out each time she reads, her reading fluency will be greatly reduced. That means your new reader will come across them over and over again. The first reason is that they occur so often in almost any given reading passage.

You see each word as a whole, not as a group of letters with individual sounds, and you immediately recognize what it stands for.īut why are sight words so important for early readers? The definition of sight words given in this article offers a clue. Think about it, when was the last time you stopped to “sound out” a word, or puzzle over its meaning? Unless you’re reading a piece about bacteriophages or paleobotany, every time you open a book or look up something on the Internet, you probably read pages and pages of words you easily recognize by sight. In time, for most adults, nearly all words become sight words. You simply need to know what they are and mean by sight. For more advanced readers, words like “thorough” and “enough” fall into the category because sounding them out leads to a mouthful of garbled syllables. For an early reader, “to” would be considered a sight word because it is used so often. Sight words vary significantly depending on the age and skill of the reader. These words need to be recognized as a whole simply because there is no other reasonable way to make them a part of a child’s vocabulary. The second meaning of “sight words” applies to words that simply can’t be sounded out. These words should be learned “by sight,” meaning that they can be immediately recognized without needing to be sounded out or figured out from context clues. For early readers, sight words can refer to the small words that appear in almost any early reading text. If you’ve looked into ways to help your child learn to read, then you’ve probably come across the term “sight words.” For those of you who don’t remember from your own school days, the term means two slightly different, but related things. How many sight words should a kindergartener know? Read on. Sight words are an important part of the process. And, if you have a child in that age range, then you’re probably already starting to think about ways you can help her as she starts on this exciting new adventure. One that can affect every other aspect of her life for years to come. As your child approaches kindergarten age, she is about to take a giant step in her young life.
