ANSWER:
When working with students who have struggled to master foundational reading skills, such as sight word recognition, I rely on intense instruction with a list of words known as the 'Fry Words.' These are 1000 words broken down into ten groups of one hundred words. Each group of one hundred words can be broken down into smaller increments and learned in chunks. Statistics have proven that once a child masters the first three lists of words, then he or she has mastered 65% of any text he or she is presented with. As subsequent lists continued to be mastered beyond the third list, of course the percentage of Fry Word content per any text read will significantly increase. Therefore, a very high percentage of all text read will contain sight words that your child has learned to recognize with automaticity. This will increase fluency while reducing the amount of words your child will struggle with.
IMPORTANT: Remember, sight words are just that. They are words to be memorized upon sight. Generally speaking, you should not ask your child to 'sound out' the words. Track your finger under each word to encourage your child to look at the whole word, and then pronounce it. If he or she does not know the word, then provide the word to your child. With the importance of automatic recognition emphasized, use your judgment as to specific features you might want your child to focus on in order to assist with the automatic recognition. Features such as vowel sounds, consonant blends, consonant digraphs, special vowel sounds. You can find information on the features I am speaking of under the decoding section of the 'Reading Grid' page on this website.
There are many great resources that can be found through a Google search of Fry Words. This picture contains a link to one of my favorite sites Fry Word sites. Once you are on that site, scroll until you see: FREE: Download 10 Sets of Fry 1000 Instant Words(Flashcards and Wordlists, and then follow the instructions for downloading
your free sets of Fry Instant words.
