The importance of sight vocabulary recognition

Sight vocabulary is an individual's own "bank account" of words, which they can recognize without trouble. It's essential for children to develop a solid base of these words. By doing so, they learn to recognize important sets of words they'll often use when learning to read.

Sight vocabulary allows children to build a solid foundation of high frequency words, in hopes that when reading, the child will recognize these words on sight. To foster the learning process in building a sight word base, parents, teachers and students can benefit by making it enjoyable. Some ways to make this process enjoyable include the following:

• flashcards
• magnetic letters (use on an appliance)
• Bingo
• Dry erase boards (children love writing with markers)
• Get a bowl of sand, sugar, flower, etc.; have the child say and write the words with their fingers

When a strong foundation has been achieved with a base set of sight words (i.e. am, is, do, go, the, for, like), the child is ready to further their emergent development in the reading process by improving their word identification aptitude.

• While increasing and improving their sight word vocabulary, the child next needs to work on their word identification skills.
• When a child comes across a difficult word in text, word identification helps them navigate through the issue.
• They learn to skip over difficult words and only go back to them when they've come to the end of the sentence.
• Now, the child may return to the difficult word and try to replace it with another word that makes sense.
• Another manner to help foster a child's word identification skill is the Cloze strategy.
• This strategy has written text with various words missing (deleted). This allows the child to insert words, which make logical sense to the remaining portion of the text.

• Lastly, another manner to help improve a child's word identification skill is by working with multi-syllable words.
• Here the child — with the help of a teacher — divides larger words into smaller pieces. For example, the word basketball can be divided into two smaller components: basket and ball.
• In essence, you're allowing the child to break larger words into more manageable chunks to facilitate word recognition.
• As this process grows, the child naturally works their way into developing phonetic awareness.
• Phonetic awareness allows a child who may only understand part of a word, but they are able to sound out the rest (phonics) to blend the sounds together.
• Therefore, if a child has the sight word recognition for ball, but don't quite understand basket, they can sound the letters out and slowly combine the two into one word.

In the end, by practising the strategies provided, a child will certainly increase not only their sight word vocabulary, but their word identification and phonetic understanding will allow the child to continue their journey into becoming an independent reader.