Sight Words

Thanks to Little Man's awesome Pre-K teacher, he has mastered all of his letters and their sounds.  I am forever appreciative of her because he did not want to learn from me despite my many attempts over the previous summer.

Regardless of my failure, I talked with his teacher to ask if he was ready for some basic sight words.  This is super new territory for me.  Over my seven years of teaching fourth grade, I only had 4 students who were not able to read.  Thankfully, I wasn't solely responsible for teaching them emergent reading skills.  I partnered with another resource teacher to guide me along in aiding them.  However, teaching a 10 year old to read is a lot different than teaching a 5 year old to read.  Their interests are just a tad bit different, but when I saw this "Parking Lot Sight Word" activity on Pinterest, I knew I had found the golden key.

This week while Little Man is off school, we began our start on the Dolch Sight Word List.  Since this activity involved cars, he was very motivated to do it.  I was so relieved.  Here's our start to list #1...

Some of the words he is able to sound out in order to decode the word and others he's having to remember by sight since he doesn't know blends or the many sounds of vowels controlled by other letters.  I guess that's why they call them sight words for the younger ones ;)

So far Little Man is doing excellent with the 12 words we started with.  While I'm calling out the word for him to park on, I also use it in a sentence.  I mainly do this so he knows the letter "I" and the letter "a" are actually words as well and not just letters.  That confused him when we first began.  After he has List #1 mastered on the parking lot, I hope to move him to flash cards.  We'll see if my plan goes accordingly.