That number is even greater for dyslexic students! Isn’t that number astounding? That’s why students need exposure to these words over and over and over again if we want them to “stick.” So, how can we do that? Nine. That’s the number of times it takes an average child to see a word and automatically recognize it. Ding! That was the piece of the puzzle I was missing! So, why was that sight word piece so important? Why? Because they were no longer having to use up all of their energy and effort on trying to read high-frequency words, which meant they could begin focusing on the “meat” of the text. It wasn’t long before I began to see progress with these struggling readers. While reading, students were able to focus on comprehension while simultaneously applying all of those great sight word and phonics/phonemic awareness practices. Then, the rest of the time (half of the time) was spent reading. Another chunk of time was spent practicing just phonics and phonemic awareness skills. A good chunk of time was spent practicing just sight words.
Phonics and phonemic awareness were still integral parts of my instruction, but we also began tackling sight words through hands-on practices.īelow is a pie chart to show you an example of how I broke up our 20-minute small group sessions. That simple discovery completely changed how I organized my time with my small groups. It wasn’t until I stepped back and looked at my reading block and discovered I was not incorporating enough of one very important piece: sight word instruction and practice. “What am I NOT doing to meet these students’ needs?” I asked myself. That’s not how I wanted to begin my students’ journey to reading! They were already finding reading to be frustrating. With my struggling readers, we were spending ample time on phonics and phonemic awareness skills, but they were still getting “stuck” on words as they were reading simple texts. However, in this same class, I had students that were just beginning to put letters together to make words.
In this class, I had one group of students that were diving deep into challenging texts early on in the year. In the words of Chrysanthemum’s father, they were “absolutely perfect” - I mean it! But, they were a challenging group for me because of how different they were academically particularly when it came to reading.
A few years ago, I was faced with an extremely challenging class.
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