About Your Kindergartner's Word List

A successful journey to literacy begins with incremental, concrete-sequential steps.  

Establishing the alphabetic principle is the most critical initial step to success in literacy.  The alphabetic principle includes phonemic and phonological awareness.  Don't take my word for it.  Check out what the National Reading Panel has to say. We are entering the beginning of a paradigm shift in our society's approach to early literacy, and this shift will result in a more literate society.  In the meantime, I realize paradigms do not shift overnight.  The purpose of this blog is to assist in building bridges.

If your kindergarten student brings home a word list (sight words, instant words, etc.), and he/she is supposed to learn the words on the list over the year, here is some advice.  My two cents are the result of years of reading, research, observations of emerging readers, teaching my own children and aha moments working to intervene with older, struggling readers.   

In the forefront of your mind, remember to keep it simple with the right information first, honoring your child's analytic skills every step of the way.

1) Wait to begin work with instant words/sight words until your child mastered learning letter sounds.  The Souns Tracking Sheet is available for use.

2) As a child learns more and more letter sounds, she is ready to practice building (encoding) C-V-C (Consonant-Vowel-Consonant) words.  What is a C-V-C word?  You can practice C-V-C words at home with lower-case letter refrigerator magnets and a cookie sheet. 

3)  If your child practices building enough C-V-C words, your child will read decodable C-V-C words.  My daughter read her first word in the back seat of the car off of a Macy's advertisement!  Watch the video!

4) Once your child is comfortable encoding and decoding C-V-C words,  you may grab that list.  Remember,  practice tricky words/ puzzle words/ sight words in context and not on flashcards.  Context is key!

Here is how I am working with the kindergarten word list in our home.

I successfully dodged these lists for the past two years with my older daughter in preschool and kindergarten.  At the start of first grade, she reads brilliantly and well above grade-level expectations.  Unfortunately,  I am not successfully dodging these words with my younger daughter who is insistent on practicing.  Hence, I am writing this blog for other parents.

My daughter brought home the words pictured below to practice.  The words lack a direct, meaningful context.  Many of them are easily decodable: see, can, like and look. The list she is expected to know is a mix of decodable and puzzle words.   I honor her intellect and analytic skills, and I never ask her to look and remember.  I ask her to look at the sounds to see if she can figure it out.  

Instead of practicing the words in isolation, I wrote simple sentence with lots of easy-to-decode words which created meaning. Again, honor your child's intellect and allow her to say each sound /c/ /a/ /n/ and put it together to read, "can."  Every small victory is a flying leap on the path to literacy.  If she is unable to figure out the word, I help.  For instance, in "my," she can identify the /m/ and I help with the rest.   Then, we follow the reading of the word with the reading of a simple sentence. 

                                                             

     

We practice by reading one word and then reading the sentence with the word in context.  We do not memorize words.  We read them.

Why? 

Diane McGuinness writes in Early Reading Instruction, “... we know that time spent memorizing sight-words can cause a negative outcome by promoting a strategy of ‘whole word guessing.’ This is where children decode the first letter phonetically and guess the rest  of the word based on length and shape. This strategy is highly predictive of reading failure.” (pp. 114- 115)

I confirmed McGuinness'  finding in my research, but I have an expanded hypothesis about why it is happening.  Kids do not just misread these words guessing using the first letter. Older struggling readers misread words that look nothing alike. Some look similar in structure.  Others do not.   Brains are powerful pattern decoders.  Evidence that the brain is a pattern decoder is described on page 72 of Pinker’s work, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language.  I suspect if the only pattern the brain finds between words is the pattern of flipping flash cards, those words become interchangeable in the mind's eye.  Children have very clever brains!   Now, think of the meaning difference between reading "A" vs."He"  or "there" vs. "his."  These errors become well-hidden comprehension issues in older grades.  See the list of words read incorrectly by children in camp last summer. 

I realize some schools will not let a child "pass" kindergarten until she knows X out of 100 words.  If this is what you are facing, only begin once sounds are known, mastered and applied.  Then, always  practice tricky words/ puzzle words/ sight words in context and never on flashcards.  

This is not an isolated problem with a teacher or a school.  It is a systemic problem.  I won't write yet about the mass confusion surrounding the term "sight words" except to say, most word lists floating around have plenty of decodable words that are not "sight words."

I wish I could go back to my time in the classroom with the understanding I gained after meeting Brenda Erickson, my mentor and veteran Montessori practitioner.  Since time travel is not a current option, I will offer my new insight with any parent or teacher who desires to learn.