And once your child learns basic sight words, they won’t need to spend a lot of time trying to decipher these high-frequency words.
These words occur so frequently that readers, including very young readers, need to know them instantly. Sight words aren’t easy to sound out or decode, especially for young readers who are just learning the rules to sound out words, so we memorize them (or, in other words, recognize them by sight). Even the simplest texts would become grueling to read.Ĭommon words in the English language (like the) are often grouped together in the early stages of reading - these are what we mean when we speak about sight words. Imagine pausing every time you ran across this word in a book, on a poster, or in a magazine. What’s the most common word in the English language? It’s the.
