What are Sight Words?
Sight words are words that students need to be able to recognize instantly (or within just a few seconds). Some words are sight words because they appear in text so frequently that students should learn to recognize them without much effort. Other words are sight words because they do not fit the conventional spelling rules of the English language, and therefore must be memorized. As beginning readers are developing the skills they need to decode, teachers present certain sight words as exceptions to the phonics rules they are teaching their students. Teachers show students that if they try to apply their learned phonics rules to non-decodable sight words, they will either have a very difficult time reading them, or they will read them incorrectly.
What are Decodable Words?
Words that can be decoded, on the other hand, do follow conventional phonics rules. These words contain spelling patterns that commonly occur in words. Some decodable words occasionally contain one irregular spelling pattern, at most. These words contain enough common spelling patterns that the student should be able to reason out what the word is.
How to Tell the Difference
Even though any adult reading this is presumably a fluent reader and likely has been for some time, most adults not in education or linguistics probably don’t know the phonics rules that dictate our language. Therefore, it can be hard to know when your child has come across a sight word (which, again, often can’t be decoded) and when we can encourage them to sound it out. Instead of providing a crash course in all the phonics rules your child may be learning between Kindergarten and second grade, here is a list of some common sight words that cannot be decoded. If your child is stuck on one of these words, don’t have them sound it out—if they’re correctly applying phonics rules, they won’t be able to!
Common Sight Words by Grade Level
A case for decoding words
Anytime a student comes across an unknown word that follows regular spelling conventions, they should make every effort to decode it. Decoding unknown words, while time-consuming in the moment, makes students much better readers in the long run. Their brains create connections every time they sound out a word, and those connections bring them closer and closer to having that word stored in long-term memory. When students are given the pronunciation for words they are able to decode themselves, their brains make far fewer connections. This means it will take them much longer to create that long-term learning.
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