#050 The Dos and Don’ts of Teaching Sight Words – An Evidence Based Approach

Podcast episode #50 will provide you with practical evidence based teaching tips that can potentially enable a child to store and retrieve hundreds more words than they would be able to if they’d been taught using the widely common 'whole word' teaching methodology.

Step into any English speaking, early year’s classroom and you can pretty much be assured of one thing, children are being given copious lists of ‘sight words’ to memorise or learn by heart.  Until quite recently, it seems that this practice has received very little opposition.

Well I’m here to tell you that science is telling us a different story.

There is a better way to teach sight words and (spoiler alert) you may be surprised to learn that  all words should be taught this way.

For those of you who have already begun your journey into the ‘science of reading’, you may have discovered that there is a real shift away from traditional whole word memorisation to a process called orthographic mapping which I will explain in this episode.

We’ve also learnt that the order in which we should introduce sight words needs to be given careful consideration, to ensure it aligns with the developmental decoding process of spelling patterns.

Find out more here: https://theliteracycollective.com/podcast/