What are high frequency words?
According to some research, "Sight words, often also called high frequency sight words, are commonly used words that young children are encouraged to memorize as a whole by sight, so that they can automatically recognize these words in print within three seconds without having to use any strategies to decode" (Wikipedia, 2019).
So I have been looking at what words are used a lot. I'm sure you are thinking about a ton of them too. Well the good thing is I have created a few lists and a few trackers to help you monitor student's knowledge of the high frequency words.
I think about myself as a Spanish language learner. Now, let's think about our four language domains; reading, writing, listening, speaking. From easiest to hardest: listening, speaking, reading, writing! So writing is the way we show that we have learned something. It's the output of reading, like speaking is the output of listening. However comparing the outputs, writing is more challenging than speaking.
Sight words "sight" that means seeing with your eyes. That means reading. But as we just investigated, reading, seeing, is an input. We won't know our students have learned those "sight words" until they write them. This is why I prefer high frequency words to sight words. We need our students to be able to write them. WRITE THEM.
Remember these three rules of writing:
1- The word has to be written in under 3 seconds.
2- The word has to be written in the correct order (t-h-e not h-t-e).
3- The word has to be written with correct letter formation; NO CAPITALS or backwards letters.
So track your students. Can they write these high frequency words, following the three rules? If so, students will be able to read them in multiple fonts and use them when reading trickier words. These words have to be learned and fast! Students can't progress and develop their reading processing systems if they don't have these words down solid in their word banks.
Think beyond sight words to high frequency words: and head to my Teachers Pay Teachers site to down load your free high frequency word packages.
Teachers Pay Teachers:
References:
Wikipedia. (2019, October 11). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sight_word
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