Helping students build a strong sight word vocabulary is both easy and effective and also has a high impact for the relatively small amount of time put in. Sight words are high frequency words that usually do not follow the rules of phonics. For example, the words “sight” and “the” are sight words because they cannot be decoded using the regular rules of phonics. A good source to go to for lists of sight words is http://www.sightwords.com/. Click on the flashcards link and see which list best suits your child—the level of difficulty increases with each list. Practice these daily, starting with 10 cards at a time and eventually building up to 30 or so. Before you change lists and work on new words, be sure your child knows all the words in your current list well. This will only take a few minutes each day, and once your child knows these words automatically, reading will be noticeably easier for her.
