How to Teach Kindergartners Sight Words

Video Transcript

"When teaching young children, you may hear the phrases either sight words, high frequency words, and sometimes even dutch words. These are words that are used commonly in our vocabularies that children should become familiar with on sight to recognize immediately because they'll be used often in what the children are reading, and behind me, you'll see a word wall. This is an example of a first and second grade word wall, so they may be words a little more challenging than what I would put in a kindergarten classroom. The best way to introduce these high frequency or sight words to a student is to introduce on to two per week. Use them repeatedly. Put them on an index card and introduce them to the student over and over. If it's an action word, you may want to act out the action so the child can see it and remember what it goes along with. Another silly example that you can use when I introduce the word look to students, I always take my eyes, and I make my double oh's for the oh's in the middle of look. Any little tip or tool that you can use to show the children these words will help them to remember it immediately upon site. Post the words then in a word wall where the children can refer to it both when reading and also when writing. You'll want to make sure that you also practice these words when you're journaling, and in addition if you have any worksheets that make good use of these words, in a letter scramble, or to practice writing the words in sentences, it would be a wonderful help."