Sight words for 3 year old: Preschool Dolch sight words Learning to read

Sight Words FAQs | Sight Words: Teach Your Child to Read

Sight Words FAQs | Sight Words: Teach Your Child to Read






Q: How many words should I teach per day?
A: There is no set answer to the number of words to teach a child each day. Factors such as the child’s age, motivation, memory skills, and whether the child is learning a specific list for a school assignment affect this decision. But remember: it is much better for a child to have solid knowledge of 50 words than to kind of know 300 words. It is not enough for children to kind of know their sight words. They need to be able to recognize them instantly and accurately in order to build reading fluency and comprehension of written material they will read in books.

It is much better for a child to have solid knowledge of 50 words than to kind of know 300 words.

We recommend that you start by thoroughly teaching your child three to five words in a lesson. On the first day, introduce three to five new words. In the next day’s lesson, start by reviewing the previous day’s words. If your child remembers those words, move on to introducing three to five new words. If he struggles with, let’s say, two of the previous day’s words, go through our full sequence of teaching techniques with those two words and then introduce just one to three new words.
If your child aces the review part of each lesson, then you can probably introduce more new words per day. If he repeatedly struggles to remember the previously covered words, then slow down the pace.
Q: When teaching sight words, should I use pictures together with written words?
A: The research indicates that most typically developing children learn sight words better without accompanying pictures. However, children who have cognitive delays, such as Down syndrome, seem to benefit from sight words being accompanied by picture cards.
Q: Should I correct mistakes immediately, or wait until the end of the lesson or game?
A: All errors should be corrected immediately. Please see our corrections procedure for instructions on how to correct mistakes in a positive, constructive way. It only takes a few seconds, so it won’t disrupt the flow of your lesson or game.
Q: What does it mean to “master” a sight word?
A: A child should recognize the presented target word three times in a row for three days in a row. The child should be able to identify and say the word quickly, showing that they know the word by sight and do not have to sound it out letter-by-letter.
Q: My child is doing a great job with these activities! How much praise should I give her after each correct answer?
A: Actually, very little. Gushing praise (“You are so smart,” a high five, “That’s wonderful!”) can be a major distraction to a young child with a short attention span. By the time you’ve finished praising her, she may have totally forgotten what she learned!
Stick to a simple affirmation of a right answer (“Correct” or “That’s right”), and then continue with the activity. Similarly, if the child gives a wrong answer, point out the mistake and the correct answer in a simple, direct manner. You’re not being mean, you’re just staying focused!
Q: What’s the best way to keep track of which sight words my child has mastered and which ones are still being studied?
A simple way to organize the child’s sight words that have been mastered or on which the child is presently working is to use a 5″x8″ card file box with A-Z file dividers. Place a card marked CURRENT WORDS in the front of the box, and place another card marked MASTERED WORDS that will separate current words from mastered words. Then file mastered words alphabetically behind the A-Z file cards. The words currently being learned are best filed in random (non-alphabetical) order.
Q: My child enjoys the games a lot more than the lessons, so I’m tempted to just do the games. Is that okay?
A: No. Our sight words games are excellent tools for reinforcing the knowledge your child has acquired from the lessons, but they are not a replacement for the sight words lessons. If a child gets bored or distracted easily, consider shortening the lessons (by covering fewer words), but do not eliminate them!
Q: Why are sight words sometimes called “service words”?
A: Sight words actually service the reader by improving the child’s fluent, smooth reading of connected text in phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. Research has strongly shown that fluency in reading is a vital prerequisite for good reading comprehension. If the process of reading print is too slow and laborious, the reader’s comprehension of printed material will be seriously impeded.
Q: When is it developmentally appropriate to teach sight words? At what age are children ready to learn sight words?
A: Children’s language skills develop at different rates, so we can’t give you hard-and-fast age rules. Most children will be able to master a few sight words in Pre-K (four years old). You can teach sight words earlier if your child is receptive to the material. But if your 2- or 3-year-old is uninterested and has difficulty retaining the words, then it’s probably too early, and you should wait a few months before trying again.
A good goal, according to child literacy expert Timothy Shanahan, is that children should master 20 sight words by the end of Kindergarten and 100 sight words by the end of First Grade.
Q: Should I be teaching my child sight words instead of phonics?
A: No! Sight words are a supplement to phonics instruction, not a substitute! Phonics teaches your child the rules for decoding and reading most words. Sight words instruction is a strategy of focusing extra attention on the words that occur most frequently, so that your child doesn’t have to stop and decode every single word.

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Three Letter Words for 4 Year Olds

Do you want to start teaching your child to read and want to know what words he needs to learn? If you do, then read on for suitable words and teaching tips.

Dolch Sight Words

If you are going to teach your four year old to read, then you might want to know about Dolch sight words. These are a good place to start. Two hundred twenty words have been identified as high frequency words and the list is spread out over the years from preschool to third grade. Of course, these are not the only words he would need to learn, but the Dolch words show up in between 50 and 75 percent of all the words in books, newspapers, and magazines.

Here are the Dolch preschool sight words:

a, and, away, big, blue, can, come, down, find, for, funny, go, help, here, I, in, is, it, jump, little, look, make, me, my, not, one, play, red, run, said, see, the, three, to, two, up, we, where, yellow, you

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Three Letter Words

Thirteen of the Dolch preschool sight words are three letter words. Other three letter, high frequency words for four year olds include:

all, and, any, are, bad, bet, big, box, boy, bye, can, car, cat, cup, cut, day, did, dog, dry, eat, eve, fly, for, get, had, has, her, him, his, hot, how, huh, hum, let, lot, man, may, mom, new, not, off, old, one, our, out, pet, put, red, run, saw, say, see, she, sit, some, the, too, top, try, two, use, was, way, who, why, yes, yet, you

Three letter words four year olds

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Teaching Your Four Year Old to Read

Before you start teaching your child to read, they need to master certain skills. These are:

• Knowing the difference between a picture and print
• Being familiar with books and know that you read from left to right
• Knowing the upper and lower case letters of the alphabet

Next you would start teaching the sounds that are associated with each letter.

• You could use blocks with the letters on them and put them together to make words.
• You could also use cards with letters on them, like flash cards.
• Work on what sound comes at the start, middle, and end of a word.
• Practice with consonant-vowel-consonant word flashcards.

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Tips on Teaching the Alphabet

A good place to start is with the ABC Song. While you are reading to your child, which should be done at least once a day, point out a letter occasionally and ask him what it is. Pick a letter each week and do activities with something that starts with that letter. For example, ideas for A – D include:

• make applesauce or art prints with half an apple dipped in paint
• blow bubbles
• make cookies
• make doughnuts from biscuits

Letters can be made lots of ways.

• Play Do or clay can be rolled into a worm and the letters can be shaped.
• You can take a roll of cookie dough and either make some letters with it or use cookie cutters.
• Licorice is another good food to make letters with.
• You could also buy cheap cereal and glue the pieces on paper where you have written a letter.

Start looking around and you will find lots of ways to form letters and make learning them fun.

Children’s gymnastics for the eyes – the best sets of exercises for children

Increased visual load leads to a deterioration in the child’s vision. Computer games and gadgets, schoolwork, reading, doing homework – all this requires hard work of the eyes, leading to fatigue. This is fraught with discomfort, headaches and the occurrence of various visual impairments.

Make an appointment for your child to see a doctor

Regular exercise for the eyes minimizes harm and provides effective prevention of visual acuity reduction caused by overexertion. At the same time, you need to understand that no gymnastics will help cure visual disorders, for example, myopia.

When choosing gymnastics for the eyes, a lot depends on the age of the child. Some complexes are very simple, they are suitable for kids. However, parents should work with young children, explain to them what and how to do, show by example and make sure that the child does the exercises correctly. Other complexes are somewhat more complicated, they are designed for older children who are able to independently figure out how to do exercises for the eyes.

An important clarification: before doing gymnastics, it is recommended that you consult an ophthalmologist with your child. The doctor will exclude possible contraindications and give additional recommendations.

Contents

1. Exercises for 2-4 year olds
2. Visual gymnastics for children 5-6 years old
3. Exercises for school children
4. Recap

Eye exercise for children aged 2-4

At this age, the child, as a rule, is not yet able to concentrate on one lesson for a long time. It means that:

• the duration of gymnastics should not be long – it is better to do the exercises about 3 times a day for 1-2 minutes;
• classes must be carried out in a playful way, and this should be done when the baby is in a good mood, he is comfortable, he is not naughty.

The first exercise, which is called “Blind Man’s Bluff” , helps to strengthen the muscles of the eyes:

• ask the child to close his eyes;
• count to three;
• now tell the baby to open his eyes.

In this case, it is important that a small child learns to first strain his eyes, and then relax them. At first, you can invite him to watch you and at first close his eyes, sit a little with his eyes closed, and then open them so that it is easier for the baby to understand what you want from him.

The second exercise is “Butterfly Wings” . It aims to improve blood circulation in the eyes.

Let the child imagine that his eyelashes are the wings of a butterfly. In order for a butterfly to fly, it must quickly flap its wings, that is, the child must blink intensively. Let one “flight” continue for 10 seconds, then let your eyes rest for 5-10 seconds and repeat the exercise one or two more times.

And the third exercise that is suitable for children of this age is “Rhymes” . It makes it possible to relieve tension from the eyes and strengthen the eye muscles.

You recite poems, while the child must perform eye movements that correspond to what you say. When performing this exercise, you also need to first show everything by your own example, so that the baby understands what he needs to do.

Take, for example, these verses:

Here is a big Christmas tree –

This is the height (the baby looks up, as if trying to see the top of the Christmas tree)

She has big branches –

This is the width of (the baby looks from left to right, as if estimating the width of an imaginary Christmas tree)

There are even bumps on the Christmas tree (the kid looks up, looking for imaginary bumps),

And below – the bear’s lair (the baby looks down),

In winter, a clubfoot sleeps there (the child closes his eyes, imitating a sleeping bear, then blinks several times and closes his eyes again)

And sucks his paw in the den.

When performing this exercise, you need to ensure that the child moves his eyes, and not his head. If necessary, carefully correct it and explain again what needs to be done.

Eye exercises for children aged 5-6 years

Although the child is getting older, the playful form of exercise is still preferred. But now the baby understands better what you want from him, and can concentrate on the task assigned to him, so the duration of classes can be increased to 5-7 minutes.

Do exercises for the eyes in a playful way so that the child does not get bored and tries harder

The first exercise from the complex is called “Warm-up” . It is great for relieving stress from the eyes. As in the previous complex, it is worth using some verses here. The child will, in accordance with their rhythm and content, perform certain eye movements, for example:

Slept flower (child closes eyes, relaxes)

And suddenly woke up (the child opens his eyes, massages his eyelids, slightly pressing them clockwise and counterclockwise),

I didn’t want to sleep anymore (on this line you need to blink your eyes often),

Startled, stretched (raise your hands up and inhale, then look at your hands, spread them apart and exhale),

Soared up and flew (you need to shake the brushes, look left and right).

The second exercise is “Geometry Lesson” . For him, you need to prepare “training material” in advance. You will need:

• images of basic geometric figures – you can do with a circle, square and triangle;
• a pointer or an object that can be used instead.

The exercise itself is performed as follows:

• place pictures of geometric shapes on the wall, closet door, blackboard;
• use a pointer to show angles, trace contours;
• while the child needs to look at the tip of the pointer without moving his head.

Geometry Lesson stimulates blood circulation in the eyes, develops and strengthens the eye muscles.

Another exercise – “Drawing with the eyes” . It helps to strengthen the eye muscles, and at the same time promotes the development of creative abilities. Invite the child to draw something in the air, using not a pencil, not a brush and paints, but their own eyes. It can be a house or a person, a dog or a tree, it all depends on the imagination – his and yours.

The main thing is that the child moves his eyes in different directions. You can set an example for him by using eye movements to make a simple drawing, a geometric figure, or a letter.

It is advisable to perform all these exercises in a complex so that the exercises look more diverse and do not cause boredom in the child. Their sequence can be changed.

Eye exercises for school children

Children grow up, become more serious and responsible, so there should be no problems with concentration, and now it’s easier for you to explain what and how to do. On the other hand, they may not like the nursery rhyme classes at this age, so other exercises must be used.

It is the parents who should teach the child to exercise and care for vision.

The first is “House of Hands” . It will help improve blood circulation in the eyes and will be a good warm-up before the following exercises:

1. Invite the child to put their hands together with their fingers crossed to make a “house”.
2. This “house” must be placed over the bridge of the nose so that the crossed fingers touch the forehead, and the eyes are covered with palms. At the same time, as little light as possible should penetrate to the eyes.
3. Now you need to blink, move your eyes left and right and “draw” numbers, letters, simple geometric shapes with them.

You need to do this exercise for one to two minutes. The “house of palms” can be used as a break while reading, watching TV or working at the computer.

The next exercise, “Imaginary Picture” , is suitable for both school-age children and adults. It helps to improve accommodation, that is, the ability to clearly perceive objects that are at different distances from the eyes, and also contributes to the development of fantasy.

To perform the exercise, you need to prepare in advance. Draw a picture with your child that shows many details, for example, a seashore with rocks and a lighthouse on them, birds over the waves, a ship sailing in the distance.

1. Attach the painting to a wall, closet door, or chalkboard.
2. Let the child look at the picture, look at the details.
3. Ask him what he would like to add to the drawing, ask him, without touching the picture with his hands, to tell where what he proposed could appear. If he has no ideas of his own, suggest something of your own and ask him to develop this thought.

After a while, you can try to do the same, but without a drawing. Let the seashore on the wall be completely imaginary.

The optimal time for this exercise is 5-7 minutes. But if you feel that the child is bored, you can stop earlier.

Exercise “Drawing with the nose” assumes that the student will draw imaginary drawings using not the look, as was the case in the previous complex, but the tip of his nose. You can do this standing, sitting, and even lying down, but it is better to take a sitting position. You can close your eyes while doing this.

In this case, it is important to relieve tension not only from the eyes, but also from the muscles of the neck. If you sit for a long time at a desk or in front of the TV, the blood flow in the neck deteriorates, and this leads to a deterioration in the blood supply to the eyes. The Nose Drawing exercise helps to prevent these unpleasant consequences.

Summing up

Gymnastics for the eyes with children should be done regularly, only in this case it will be truly effective. If the kid has been doing such gymnastics for several years, it will be easier for him to continue doing it after entering school. He will also more easily tolerate the increased load on the eyes due to the good preparation of the eye muscles.

The younger the child, the more important the role of parents in gymnastics. They need to be reminded of the need to do exercises, motivate, set an example. If the baby does not understand why such gymnastics is needed, you need to somehow interest him – in an easy game form. For example, if he likes superheroes, you can tell that you can’t become a superhero without good eyesight.

Be sure to consult an ophthalmologist. High myopia, increased eye pressure, inflammatory eye diseases – all of the above are contraindications for exercise. Therefore, the specialist will tell you how long you should refrain from gymnastics, and will also help you choose eye exercises that will be especially effective for your child, taking into account his individual characteristics.

Make an appointment with a doctor

How to learn to read 3 times faster in 20 minutes

Education

October 6, 2020

Grab a book and check the effect for yourself right now.

Iya Zorina

Author of Lifehacker, athlete, CCM

Background: “Project PX”

Back in 1998, Princeton University hosted a seminar called “Project PX” (Project PX), dedicated to high reading speed. This article is an excerpt from that seminar and personal experience of speeding up reading.

So, “Project PX” is a three-hour cognitive experiment that allows you to increase your reading speed by 386%. It was conducted on people who spoke five languages, and even dyslexics were trained to read up to 3,000 words of technical text per minute, 10 pages of text. Page in 6 seconds.

For comparison, the average reading speed in the US is between 200 and 300 words per minute. We have in connection with the peculiarities of the language – from 120 to 180. And you can easily increase your performance to 700-900 words per minute.

All that is needed is to understand the principles of human vision, what time is wasted in the process of reading and how to stop wasting it. When we analyze the mistakes and practice not making them, you will read several times faster and not mindlessly running your eyes, but perceiving and remembering all the information you read.

Preparation

For our experiment you will need:

• a book of at least 200 pages;
• pen or pencil;
• timer.

The book should lie in front of you without being closed (press the pages if it tends to close without support).

Find a book that you don’t have to hold so that it doesn’t close

You will need at least 20 minutes for one exercise session. Make sure that no one distracts you during this time.

Helpful Hints

Before jumping straight into the exercises, here are a few quick tips to help you speed up your reading.

1. Make as few stops as possible when reading a line of text

When we read, the eyes move through the text not smoothly, but in jumps. Each such jump ends with fixing your attention on a part of the text or stopping your gaze at areas of about a quarter of a page, as if you are taking a picture of this part of the sheet.

Each eye stop on the text lasts ¼ to ½ second.

To feel this, close one eye and lightly press the eyelid with the tip of your finger, and with the other eye try to slowly slide over the line of text. Jumps become even more obvious if you slide not in letters, but simply in a straight horizontal line:

How do you feel?

2. Try to go back as little as possible through the text

A person who reads at an average pace quite often goes back to reread a missed moment. This can happen consciously or unconsciously. In the latter case, the subconscious itself returns its eyes to the place in the text where concentration was lost.

On average, conscious and unconscious returns take up to 30% of the time.

3. Improve concentration to increase coverage of words read in one stop

People with an average reading speed use a central focus rather than horizontal peripheral vision. Due to this, they perceive half as many words in one jump of vision.

4. Practice Skills Separately

The exercises are different and you don’t have to try to combine them into one. For example, if you are training your reading speed, don’t worry about text comprehension. You will progress through three stages in sequence: learning technique, applying technique to increase speed, and reading comprehension.

Rule of thumb: Practice your technique at three times your desired reading speed. For example, if your current reading speed is somewhere around 150 words per minute, and you want to read 300, you need to practice reading 900 words per minute.

Exercises

1. Determination of the initial reading speed

Now you have to count the number of words and lines in the book that you have chosen for training. We will calculate the approximate number of words, since calculating the exact value will be too dreary and time consuming.

First, we count how many words fit in five lines of text, divide this number by five and round it up. I counted 40 words in five lines: 40 : 5 = 8 – an average of eight words per line.

Next, we count the number of lines on five pages of the book and divide the resulting number by five. I got 194 lines, I rounded up to 39 lines per page: 195 : 5 = 39.

And the last thing: we count how many words fit on the page. To do this, we multiply the average number of lines by the average number of words per line: 39× 8 = 312.

Now is the time to find out your reading speed. We set a timer for 1 minute and read the text, calmly and slowly, as you usually do.

How much did it turn out? I have a little more than a page – 328 words.

2. Landmark and speed

As I wrote above, going back through the text and stopping the gaze take a lot of time. But you can easily cut them down with a focus tracking tool. A pen, pencil or even your finger will serve as such a tool.

Technique (2 minutes)

Practice using a pen or pencil to maintain focus. Move the pencil smoothly under the line you are currently reading and concentrate on where the tip of the pencil is now.

Lead with the tip of the pencil along the lines

Set the pace with the tip of the pencil and follow it with your eyes, keeping up with stops and returns through the text. And don’t worry about understanding, it’s a speed exercise.

Try to go through each line in 1 second and increase the speed with each page.

Do not stay on one line for more than 1 second under any circumstances, even if you do not understand what the text is about.

With this technique, I was able to read 936 words in 2 minutes, so 460 words per minute. Interestingly, when you follow with a pen or pencil, it seems that your vision is ahead of the pencil and you read faster. And when you try to remove it, immediately your vision seems to spread out over the page, as if the focus was released and it began to float all over the sheet.

Speed ​​(3 minutes)

Repeat the tracker technique, but allow no more than half a second to read each line (read two lines of text in the time it takes to say “twenty-two”).

You probably won’t understand anything you read, but that doesn’t matter. Now you are training your perceptual reflexes, and these exercises help you adapt to the system. Do not slow down for 3 minutes. Concentrate on the tip of your pen and the technique for increasing speed.

In the 3 minutes of this frenetic race, I read five pages and 14 lines, averaging 586 words per minute. The hardest part of this exercise is not to slow down the speed of the pencil. This is a real block: you have been reading all your life in order to understand what you are reading, and it is not so easy to let go of this.

Thoughts cling to the lines in an effort to return to understand what it is about, and the pencil also begins to slow down. It is also difficult to maintain concentration on such useless reading, the brain gives up, and thoughts fly away to hell, which is also reflected in the speed of the pencil.

3. Expanding the area of ​​perception

When you concentrate your eyes on the center of the monitor, you still see its outer areas. So it is with the text: you concentrate on one word, and you see several words surrounding it.

Now, the more words you learn to see in this way with your peripheral vision, the faster you can read. The expanded area of ​​perception allows you to increase the speed of reading by 300%.

Beginners with a normal reading speed spend their peripheral vision on the fields, that is, they run their eyes through the letters of absolutely all the words of the text, from the first to the last. At the same time, peripheral vision is spent on empty fields, and a person loses from 25 to 50% of the time.

A boosted reader will not “read the fields”. He will run his eyes over only a few words from the sentence, and see the rest with peripheral vision. In the illustration below, you see an approximate picture of the concentration of vision of an experienced reader: words in the center are read, and foggy ones are marked by peripheral vision.

Focus on central words

Here is an example. Read this sentence:

The students once enjoyed reading for four hours straight.

If you start reading with the word “students” and end with “reading,” you save time reading as many as five words out of eight! And this reduces the time for reading this sentence by more than half.

Technique (1 minute)

Use a pencil to read as fast as possible: start with the first word of the line and end with the last. That is, no expansion of the area of ​​​​perception yet – just repeat exercise No. 1, but spend no more than 1 second on each line. Under no circumstances should one line take more than 1 second.

Technique (1 minute)

Continue to pace the reading with a pen or pencil, but start reading from the second word of the line and end the line two words before the end.

Speed ​​(3 minutes)

Start reading at the third word of the line and finish three words before the end while moving your pencil at the speed of one line per half second (two lines in the time it takes to say “twenty-two” ).

If you don’t understand anything you read, that’s okay. Now you are training your reflexes of perception, and you should not worry about understanding. Concentrate on the exercise with all your might and don’t let your mind drift away from an uninteresting activity.