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Listening | Sight Words: Teach Your Child to Read

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Our class enjoyed all of the listening activities. We loved L3. I had a home made drum and walked around our classroom beating different beats. The students had their eyes closed and had to point in the direction they sound was coming from. They all aced this activity.

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Literacy Strategies to Support Intensifying Interventions | National Center on Intensive Intervention

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NCII provides a series of reading lessons to support special education instructors, reading interventionists, and others working with students who struggle with reading. These lessons, adapted with permission from the Florida Center for Reading Research and Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk, address key reading and prereading skills and incorporate research-based instructional principles that can help intensify and individualize reading instruction.

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NCII provides a series of reading lessons to support special education instructors, reading interventionists, and others working with students who struggle with reading. These lessons, adapted with permission from the Florida Center for Reading Research and Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk, address key reading and prereading skills and incorporate research-based instructional principles that can help intensify and individualize reading instruction. The reading lessons are examples of brief instructional routines that may be used to supplement reading interventions, programs, or curricula that are currently in place. These lessons are designed to illustrate concepts and supplement, not supplant, reading instruction and interventions for struggling readers. They do not represent an exhaustive reading curriculum. It is expected that teachers would customize these lessons to meet the needs of their target students.

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The NCII reading lessons are organized around the five components of reading identified by the National Reading Panel (2000): phonemic awareness, alphabetic principal or phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Intervention programs for struggling readers may focus on just one or a few of these components, or may include all five components.

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Literacy Strategies to Support Intensifying Interventions

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
NCII provides a series of reading lessons to support special education instructors, reading interventionists, and others working with students who struggle with reading. These lessons, adapted with permission from the Florida Center for Reading Research and Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk, address key reading and prereading skills and incorporate research-based instructional principles that can help intensify and individualize reading instruction.

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Literacy Strategies to Support Intensifying Interventions | National Center on Intensive Intervention

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
NCII provides a series of reading lessons to support special education instructors, reading interventionists, and others working with students who struggle with reading. These lessons, adapted with permission from the Florida Center for Reading Research and Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk, address key reading and prereading skills and incorporate research-based instructional principles that can help intensify and individualize reading instruction.

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Literacy Strategies to Support Intensifying Interventions | National Center on Intensive Intervention

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
NCII provides a series of reading lessons to support special education instructors, reading interventionists, and others working with students who struggle with reading. These lessons, adapted with permission from the Florida Center for Reading Research and Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk, address key reading and prereading skills and incorporate research-based instructional principles that can help intensify and individualize reading instruction.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
NCII provides a series of reading lessons to support special education instructors, reading interventionists, and others working with students who struggle with reading. These lessons, adapted with permission from the Florida Center for Reading Research and Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk, address key reading and prereading skills and incorporate research-based instructional principles that can help intensify and individualize reading instruction. The reading lessons are examples of brief instructional routines that may be used to supplement reading interventions, programs, or curricula that are currently in place. These lessons are designed to illustrate concepts and supplement, not supplant, reading instruction and interventions for struggling readers. They do not represent an exhaustive reading curriculum. It is expected that teachers would customize these lessons to meet the needs of their target students.

The NCII reading lessons are organized around the five components of reading identified by the National Reading Panel (2000): phonemic awareness, alphabetic principal or phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Intervention programs for struggling readers may focus on just one or a few of these components, or may include all five components.

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Literacy Sample Lessons to Support Intensifying Intervention

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NCII provides a series of reading lessons to support special education instructors, reading interventionists, and others working with students who struggle with reading. These lessons, adapted with permission from the Florida Center for Reading Research and Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk, address key reading and prereading skills and incorporate research-based instructional principles that can help intensify and individualize reading instruction.

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Build student's Oral Language & Listening ComprehensionWith lessons-COLORS AND SHAPES OF LANGUAGE 2

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Build student's Oral Language & Listening ComprehensionWith lessons-COLORS AND SHAPES OF LANGUAGE 2

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Accurate and Automatic Reading

Reading Readiness

Basic Language Skills

Basic Language Skills - Advanced

Language Enrichment

Language Enrichment for Older Students
LEOS Lesson Plan Template

Multisensory Grammar

Oral Language & Listening Comprehension

Colors and Shapes of Language 2

Scientific Spelling

Use these lesson plans with your school's chosen spelling curriculum.

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LEOS Lesson Plan Template Colors and Shapes of Language 2 Scientific Spelling Use these lesson plans with your school's chosen spelling curriculum.

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Reading Challenges - Screening Measures - Oral Lang - Neuhaus Education Center

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Educators - Consumables - Stories for Making inferences - Neuhaus Education Center

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Using Research to Design Content-area Instruction: A Lesson Framework for Building Vocabulary, Fluency, and Comprehension | Building RTI

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The module begins by showing how fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension in early reading instruction are predictors of later student achievement. This information provides a rationale for including fluency-building and interactive read-aloud routines in your own content-area instruction. Next, it will compare a research-based fluency-building lesson to a routine that focuses on vocabulary and comprehension.

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Florida Center for Research Letter sounds

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Sight words instruction is an excellent supplement to phonics instruction. Phonics is a method for learning to read in general, while sight words instruction increases a child's familiarity with the high frequency words he will encounter most often.

The best way to learn sight words is through lots and lots of repetition, in the form of flashcard exercises and word-focused games.

Sight words are words that should be memorized to help a child learn to read and write. Learning sight words allows a child to recognize these words at a glance - on sight - without needing to break the words down into their individual letters and is the way strong readers recognize most words. Knowing common, or high frequency, words by sight makes reading easier and faster, because the reader does not need to stop to try and sound out each individual word, letter by letter.

Sight Words are memorized so that a child can recognize commonly used or phonetically irregular words at a glance, without needing to go letter-by-letter.

Other terms used to describe sight words include: service words, instant words (because you should recognize them instantly), snap words (because you should know them in a snap), and high frequency words. You will also hear them referred to as Dolch words or Fry words, the two most commonly used sight words lists.

Sight words are the glue that holds sentences together.

These pages contain resources to teach sight words, including: sight words flash cards, lessons, and games. If you are new to sight words, start with the teaching strategies to get a road map for teaching the material, showing you how to sequence the lessons and activities.

Sight words fall into two categories:

Frequently Used Words - Words that occur commonly in the English language, such as it, can, and will. Memorizing these words makes reading much easier and smoother, because the child already recognizes most of the words and can concentrate their efforts on new words. For example, knowing just the Dolch Sight Words would enable you to read about 50% of a newspaper or 80% of a children's book.

Non-Phonetic Words - Words that cannot be decoded phonetically, such as buy, talk, or come. Memorizing these words with unnatural spellings and pronunciations teaches not only these words but also helps the reader recognize similar words, such as guy, walk, or some.

There are several lists of sight words that are in common use, such as Dolch, Fry, Top 150, and Core Curriculum. There is a great deal of overlap among the lists, but the Dolch sight word list is the most popular and widely used.

3.1 Dolch Sight Words

The Dolch Sight Words list is the most commonly used set of sight words. Educator Dr. Edward William Dolch developed the list in the 1930s-40s by studying the most frequently occurring words in children's books of that era. The list contains 220 "service words" plus 95 high-frequency nouns. The Dolch sight words comprise 80% of the words you would find in a typical children's book and 50% of the words found in writing for adults. Once a child knows the Dolch words, it makes reading much easier, because the child can then focus his or her attention on the remaining words.

3.2 Fry Sight Words

The Fry Sight Words list is a more modern list of words, and was extended to capture the most common 1,000 words. Dr. Edward Fry developed this expanded list in the 1950s (and updated it in 1980), based on the most common words to appear in reading materials used in Grades 3-9. Learning all 1,000 words in the Fry sight word list would equip a child to read about 90% of the words in a typical book, newspaper, or website.

3.3 Top 150 Written Words

The Top 150 Written Words is the newest of the word lists featured on our site, and is commonly used by people who are learning to read English as a non-native language. This list consists of the 150 words that occur most frequently in printed English, according to the Word Frequency Book. This list is recommended by Sally E. Shaywitz, M.D., Professor of Learning Development at Yale University's School of Medicine.

3.4 Other Sight Words Lists

There are many newer variations, such as the Common Core sight words, that tweak the Dolch and Fry sight words lists to find the combination of words that is the most beneficial for reading development. Many teachers take existing sight word lists and customize them, adding words from their own classroom lessons.

Before a child starts learning sight words, it is important that he/she be able to recognize and name all the lower-case letters of the alphabet. When prompted with a letter, the child should be able to name the letter quickly and confidently. Note that, different from learning phonics, the child does not need to know the letters' sounds.

Before starting sight words, a child needs to be able to recognize and name all the lower-case letters of the alphabet.

If a student's knowledge of letter names is still shaky, it is important to spend time practicing this skill before jumping into sight words. Having a solid foundation in the ability to instantly recognize and name the alphabet letters will make teaching sight words easier and more meaningful for the child.

Go to our Lessons for proven strategies on how to teach and practice sight words with your child.

Every child is unique and will learn sight words at a different rate. A teacher may have a wide range of skill levels in the same classroom. Many of our sight words games can be adjusted to suit different skill levels.

Many of our activity pages feature recommendations for adjusting the game to the needs of your particular child or classroom:

Confidence Builders suggest ways to simplify a sight words game for a struggling student.

Extensions offer tips for a child who loves playing a particular game but needs to be challenged more.

Variations suggest ways to change up the game a little, by tailoring it to a child's special interests or making it "portable."

Small Group Adaptations offer ideas for scaling up from an individual child to a small group (2-5 children), ensuring that every child is engaged and learning.

Our sight words teaching techniques are based not only on classroom experience but also on the latest in child literacy research. Here is a bibliography of some of the research supporting our approach to sight words instruction:

Ceprano, M. A. "A review of selected research on methods of teaching sight words." The Reading Teacher 35:3 (1981): 314-322.

Ehri, Linnea C. "Grapheme-Phoneme Knowledge Is Essential for Learning to Read Words in English." Word Recognition in Beginning Literacy. Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1998.

Enfield, Mary Lee, and Victoria Greene. Project Read. www.projectread.com. 1969.

Gillingham, Anna, and Bessie W. Stillman. The Gillingham Manual: Remedial Training for Students with Specific Disability in Reading, Spelling, and Penmanship, 8th edition. Cambridge, MA: Educators Publishing Service, 2014.

Nist, Lindsay, and Laurice M. Joseph. "Effectiveness and Efficiency of Flashcard Drill Instructional Methods on Urban First-Graders' Word Recognition, Acquisition, Maintenance, and Generalization." School Psychology Review 37:3 (Fall 2008): 294-308.

Shaywitz, Sally E. Overcoming Dyslexia: A New and Complete Science-Based Program for Reading Problems at Any Level. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

Stoner, J.C. "Teaching at-risk students to read using specialized techniques in the regular classroom." Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3 (1991).

Wilson, Barbara A. "The Wilson Reading Method." Learning Disabilities Journal 8:1 (February 1998): 12-13.

Wilson, Barbara A. Wilson Reading System. Millbury, MA: Wilson Language Training, 1988.

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Sight words instruction is an excellent supplement to phonics instruction. Phonics is a method for learning to read in general, while sight words instruction increases a child's familiarity with the high frequency words he will encounter most often. The best way to learn sight words is through lots and lots of repetition, in the form of flashcard exercises and word-focused games.

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Reading Strategies for Struggling Readers

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Reading Strategies for Struggling Readers

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Flocabulary

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Who, What, When, Where, Why - Common Core Standards ELA - Who What When Where Why - Flocabulary

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Review the Who, What, When, Where & Why of a story with Flocabulary's educational rap song and lesson plan.

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5 W's Song: Who, What, Where, When, Why? | Song | Education.com

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Who, what, where, when, and why help kids include important information in their writing. Help them learn the 5 W's with this catchy song.

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Provides many instructional and assessment tools for improving and monitoring students' reading fluency. Includes multiple letter/sound fluency, sight word fluency, and phrase fluency charts.

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Letter Recognition

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Reading Strategies for the Struggling Reader

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Reading Strategies for the Struggling Reader

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Our curriculum is based on the following 110 games, arranged in an order that's research-supported and classroom-proven to lead to successful reading. Each game builds on the skills taught in the previous games, and the children should be confident on each of the previous lessons before they move on to a new lesson.

Children who complete this pre-reading curriculum will have a strong foundation for learning to read and will be ready to start a traditional reading curriculum of phonics and sight words.

NOTE: Be sure to consult our Before You Start page and our Pacing & Assessment page before you dive in!

1a. Phonological Awareness - Sounds in Language

1b. Phonemic Awareness - Sounds in Words

Each lesson takes approximately 15 minutes and is most effective when taught to children individually or in small groups (2-5 children). Use your lesson time to present one new game, and possibly devote 5 minutes at the end to review an activity the child has already mastered.
More Teaching Tips
Every child is different and will move through our curriculum at a different pace. A child who breezes through the Rhyming games may struggle with Compound Words, while another child will struggle with Rhyming but master the Compound Words activities very quickly.

Many of our activity pages feature recommendations for adjusting the activity to the needs of your particular child or classroom:

Confidence Builders make the game a little easier for struggling students.

Extensions offer extra challenges for children who have already mastered the main activity.

Variations suggest options for changing up the game a little to add variety.

Group Variations offer tips for scaling up from an individual child to a group of children.

Our Curriculum is specially designed and organized to lead your child from toddlerhood to full readiness for reading. Go through all the activities in order, making sure your child has a good handle on each one before you move on to the next.

Print out our Phonemic Awareness Pacing Guide for suggestions on how to focus your lessons for children of different ages. When your child reaches the end of our program, he/she will know all the letter sounds and will be well on his/her way to learning to read!

Q: How old does my child need to be before I start teaching him Phonemic Awareness?
A:The Phonemic Awareness curriculum is generally recommended for children who are three to five years old. Some of the Listening activities can be done with a child as young as two, but only if the child is a willing participant.

Q: How long will it take to go through the entire Phonemic Awareness curriculum?
A: Again, this depends on your particular child or group of children. The average time, for typical four-year-old children, is ten months or one school year.

Q: All the pages have scripts for how to do each activity. Do I really need to follow the script exactly?
A: We have worked hard to develop scripts that will make each activity go as smoothly as possible. Our scripts use age-appropriate vocabulary and terminology. We strongly recommend that you not add much to the script, particularly extra words that "clutter up" the activity and confuse or distract the child from the task at hand.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Our curriculum is based on the following 110 games, arranged in an order that's research-supported and classroom-proven to lead to successful reading. Each game builds on the skills taught in the previous games, and the children should be confident on each of the previous lessons before they move on to a new lesson.