Sight Words

| February 2, 2016

I still don’t quite understand it, because it is not how we learned to read, but nowadays kids Sam’s age are given lists of “sight words” to memorize. They are words that are commonly found in reading and they are just supposed to learn them. It allegedly makes reading easier. I don’t know. I hated memorizing vocabulary words. Doing it at age 6 seems horrible. At any rate, Sam is plugging away and doing really well. She knows quite a few of the list she got at the beginning of school. There are some she still struggles with, but she’s getting there. Some of the words you can sound out, and others you can’t. It’s the ones that they can’t sound out that she has a hard time with.

At any rate, Samantha and I were practicing her sight words last night and I decided to throw in some new ones. One of the new words was “no”. She was having trouble with it because you can’t really sound it out, but I wanted her to try. Our conversation was thus:

Me: “Come on, Sam, you should know this. Mommy says it all the time.”
Sam: [pause for thought] “Dammit?”

Sigh….Score one for Mommy….