What do these terms mean? Sight word edition.
Building a large base of sight words helps students become faster, more fluent readers. The average reader needs to see a word 4-14 times to automatically recognize it. A child with Dyslexia needs to see a word 40+ times. That makes sight word learning an important part of reading instruction and remediation. What exactly are sight words? And what is the difference between Sight Words, High Frequency words, Irregular Words, and Heart words? Keep reading below to learn the difference.
Sight Words:
These are words that are effortlessly read. These are common words that kids recognize instantly without sounding them out. The goal is to make every word a sight word. Any word can and should be a sight word because it is any word that is recognized “on sight.”
High Frequency Words:
These are words that are most frequently occurring in written and spoken materials. Knowing high frequency words allows students to improve their literacy skills, build vocabulary, and strengthen their ability to take standardized tests.
Irregular Words:
Irregular words are difficult for beginning readers to decode because they do not follow the most common letter-sound correspondences. Some irregular words only have one unexpected sound symbol relationship like (from and what). But there are some words that are totally irregular like “could” “one” and “some”
Heart Words:
Heart words are used to describe irregular words because some of the word will need to be “learned by heart” when learning heart words, students put a heart above the unexpected sound symbol relationship.
Come back later this week for a round-up of activities to help your child learn sight words/high frequency words.