Sight words (also known as high-frequency words or Dolch sight words) are words which we can read directly on seeing them, for which we don’t need to look at the letter sounds to blend them in order to read the word.
There are two main reasons why it is ‘useful’ to have a range of sight words: the first is that there are a lot of words in English (including very common ones such as ‘the’, ‘was’…) that cannot be read by blending the letters together as they are not spelled phonetically.
The second reason is that knowing sight words, even ones which can be read or decoded using phonics, makes reading a lot more fluent. One way to ‘acquire’ sight words is frequent reading and pointing them out – eventually children may remember them. But if you do want to speed up the process, or if your child isn’t remembering them and needs help, there are various games and activities you can play to help them.
More to come with the sight words list and sight words activities
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