The Truth About Sight Words

As a child, I struggled with spelling and reading sight words.  I was told over and over that English is crazy and I just have to memorize them.  Memorizing sight words works for many children.  There are long lists of high frequently sight words that children are encouraged to memorize.  I’m not saying that memorizing the sight words is a bad thing.  It’s is very efficient.  When you read this sentence, you are probably not sounding out every word.  You have probably been reading for many years and have taken some short cuts to read quickly.  I certainly don’t want to get into a Whole Language verses Phonics debacle.  The longer I work in education, the more I see that one size does not fit all.  Personally I use a classical approach to education with phonics instruction and a focus on spelling rules, but I know that there are many children that benefit from a more traditional approach.  Let’s not get into an argument about educational methods today.  That isn’t my goal.  

I want to tell you something that I discovered just recently,  years after I struggled through spelling and reading in elementary school,  years after I studied to get undergrad and graduate degrees in education,  even a few years after I stopped teaching in a classroom.  To my former students: I’m so sorry.  I would have been a much more effective reading mechanics and spelling teacher if I had known more spelling rules. Let me be clear: I learned a lot of phonics in school, but phonics alone does not a good speller make.

Fonix ulon duz not a gud spellr mak.

In school I learned the basic spelling rules: i before e except after c, and when one vowel goes walking the other does the talking. Remember those? I knew a few rules about when to double consonants, or drop the e. That was about the extent of my spelling rule knowledge.  Throughout my school years and college, I felt like I was drowning when trying to remember how to spell basic words like experience, bulletin, and field.  How I wish I could have learned more about English spelling.

Students learn the silent e rules with Super E! Who is that masked woman? The world my never know.

Here is the truth:

 

There are very few English sight words that are complete rule breakers.  Most sight words follow either a phonics rule, a spelling rule, or both.  

 

The word “have” has bothered me for years.  It looks like it should be pronounced with a long A (like the A in Acorn) doesn’t it? The A should say the long A sound because of the silent e.  The only explanation I ever received about the word "have" is that it is a sight word.  I had to remember it.  English doesn't follow the rules.

 

But at the age of 33, I learned that there are  9 different reasons for silent e.  In the word have, the e must be present because English words do not end in v.  The word “have” uses that rule instead of long vowel sound rule. 

Now I know that these obscure spelling rules sound intellectual and not very practical, but as a child with dyslexia, I would have LOVED to hear a reason why the word  “have” had an e.  I may have even remembered to spell it correctly.   



This student used Legos to build the phonogram
"oi that you may not use at the end of English words" 

I learned all these spelling rules, 28 rules all together, from a curriculum called Spell to Write and Read (SWR).  Truly, it moved me to tears to hear the English words do not end in i, u, v, or j rule. (I am not making up the bit about the happy tears...I’m very passionate about spelling rules as it turns out.)  Spell to Write and Read can be dry and not always flashy and fun, but this simple curriculum has helped me teach more than a dozen children to read.  I highly recommend using it for a struggling child.  My daughter has used it for years.



We have recently switched to Spelling You See for a change of pace, but the rules and phonics we learned from SWR have stayed with us.  I use the phonics and spelling rules daily, even with a different spelling curriculum.

If you have a child who is struggling to read or spell high frequency sight words, teach them WHY they are spelled that way with a curriculum like Spell to Write and Read.  SWR is not always teacher friendly.  It takes a while to get your bearings, but once you know what to do the weekly schedule stays the same.  Need more help? Here is a video teaching all 70 phonograms. I have several videos showing how to teach SWR, and I usually teach a beginning spelling and reading class for kindergarten and first graders in the summer.  How have you used SWR?