Are you new to the science of reading research and looking for ways to help your students learn sight words without using memorization? Whether your students are in kindergarten, first grade, or second grade (or maybe they are older students reading at this early level), read on to learn how you can align your sight word instruction with the science of reading research and help your students orthographically map high frequency words instead of memorizing them by sight!
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Researchers found that working with word families or common rime units can be very beneficial for early readers. If we look at the 37 most common word families, almost 500 words can be made from them!
The article above refers to word families as “rime units.” In this article, the terms word family and rime unit will be used interchangeably. Let’s take a moment to explore what a rime unit or word family is.
A syllable can be segmented into onset and rime. In a single syllable, the onset is the consonant sound(s) before the vowel and the rime unit is the remainder of the sounds beginning with the vowel.
Examples: c•at, br•ush
Can we use these word families to help our students learn sight words?
Absolutely! But before we dive in, let’s clarify some key terms:
In this article, we’ll be talking about helping high frequency words from the 37 most common word families become sight words.
Back to the question: Can we use these word families to help our students learn sight words? We can and we should!
Teaching high-frequency words by rime unit or word family has several benefits:
- It allows students to orthographically map the sounds for permanent storage rather than memorizing words by sight as a whole. The strategy of memorizing words by sight through visual memory is not supported by research.
- It allows you to teach several similar high-frequency words at the same time, which increases the likelihood of the words entering your students’ long-term memory. For example, –ell is one of the most common word families and it appears in the Dolch and Fry words bell, fell, sell, smell, spell, tell, and well.
- You can align your sight word instruction with your phonics instruction. For example, when you are working in the main rule of silent e, you can teach the high frequency words from the Dolch and Fry lists that include the common silent e word families -ake, -ame, -ate, ide, and –ine.
When I learned these benefits, I looked for ways to incorporate the common word families in my reading and spelling instruction. Then I decided to focus on the Fry words that use these word families. When I teach the regularly-spelled Fry words this way, it feels less daunting to help my students learn all those high frequency words because they’re already being addressed in my regular lessons.
Side note: I make sure my students understand high-frequency words as “very useful words for reading and spelling” and “words that you will need to read and spell very often” so they know the importance of practicing them. We would build them, write them, and read them throughout the unit to increase their fluency and eventually add these words to their sight word banks.
I made myself a chart of the Fry words organized by word family. Each time I introduced a new phonics rule, I checked my chart and decided which word families would be most useful to my students. For example, when I introduced the digraph –ck, I printed the pages for –ack, -ick, -ock, and –uck and incorporated them into my lessons for the unit.
A word of caution when working with word families:
Make sure you don’t fall into the habit of encouraging students to memorize the word families without making connections to the individual letter/sound correspondences. According to Kilpatrick (2016), “efficient permanent storage of rime units comes when a student can map each element in a rime (e.g. i-p = ip).”
How do we make sure students are not memorizing the word families by sight?
With the direct mapping technique! Direct mapping is a technique used to help students make connections between the individual sounds within words and the corresponding letters (Kilpatrick, 2016). The teacher asks questions that will help students develop essential skills for successful word recognition. Through the direct mapping process, students will:
- practice segmenting and isolating phonemes
- develop the habit of studying the entire word instead of looking at the first letter and making a guess
- learn to rely on the regular letter-sound connections to decode, which takes the mystery out of many high frequency words, particularly ones with irregular elements
- be encouraged to orthographically map letter strings. The letter strings may include portions of a word (such as the rime units in this resource) or the whole word.
Once words have been mapped, they are in long-term memory for automatic retrieval. That’s a fancy way of saying words become sight words!
So, are you ready to align your phonics instruction with your sight word instruction?
These worksheets will help you teach your students to read and spell words from the Dolch and Fry lists using research-backed methods that promote orthographic mapping. There are three student options included. The cut & build option you see above lets students build words with letter tiles they’ve cut from the bottom of the sheet. There are also two more options to choose from so you can differentiate and mix up your lessons while still accomplishing the same goal:
Top left: Students write letters from the box at the top of the page to create words in the word family. There is also space to add additional words your students brainstorm. Bottom right: The teacher guides the students in writing words in the word family. This page can also be used as a recording sheet for the cut & build version above.
The Teacher Reference Chart of high frequency words listed by word family will be your best friend! Your download also includes 11 pages of research and support, including details about the study of word families, the direct mapping technique, and directions for completing each version of the activity. It has everything you need to confidently begin teaching the regularly-spelled high frequency words by word family!
Wondering how to teach high frequency words with irregular spellings or untaught phonics rules?
Check out my newer blog post, Teaching “Sight Words” the Science of Reading Way!
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Source: Kilpatrick, David A. Equipped for Reading Success: A Comprehensive, Step-By-Step Program for Developing Phoneme Awareness and Fluent Word Recognition. Syracuse, NY, Casey & Kirsch Publishers, 2016.
