Mastering sight words with ease.

Before we started homeschooling in January, I asked Amy to give me a book that she would like to read. She chose "My Secret Unicorn: Dreams come true" (I do not have the book in front of me and cannot recall the author now, but anyway it is a series of books about a pony, Twilight, that can be turned into a unicorn.) Amy loves horses and fairy tales, so the story is just right for her. However, the vocabulary is quite difficult to master: to read it, to understand some of the concepts and to pronounce many of the words e.g. managing, exclaimed, electricity. (English is not her homelanguage.)

The first day of school we made a "deal" that we she would be able to read this favourite book all by herself, by the end of the year. I was concerned because the book seemed a bit too difficult and I was afraid she would become discouraged. However, so far, so good. We manage to read about one new page per week. This does not sound like much, but compared to what she was able to read last year, and what she is able to read now, it is considerable. (It helps that she is not ADD - she can concentrate if she wants to!) We are now on page 14.

Our method:
1. New words: I go through the new page and make three identical lists of all the new words + old words she still struggles with. One set of new words is on paper with an open space next to the word. The other two lists I print on different coloured carton and cut them up: one set for her, and one for me.

2. Matching: I then show her a new word e.g. "totally" and ask her to put "totally" next to "totally" on the sheet of paper. While she searches for the word, I make up oral sentences with the word e.g "Everyone totally agrees that you are a very good cook."

3. Choosing: After she has matched all the words (about 26 words per page), I again show her my flash cards one by one and ask her to find the word on the paper. Then I ask her to find the words without me showing her the flash card. I continue with this until she can indicate the words easily. (If she gets stuck, I quickly show her the flash card again.)

4. Naming: I then show her the flash cards one by one and she reads (names) them. The ones she can't read, go on a separate heap and we revise them again. She also writes down the difficult words to improve visualisation and memory.

5. Practicing reading: Then we build sentences with the new words and previous words. In the beginning we used the actual word cards, which were sorted into an alphabetical "dictionary". It was fun, but a bit time consuming to find the right words. Now I just make up sentences with the words on a white board. I use the same words over and over until she remembers them easily. She loves reading these sentences and ask that I write about "Amy". A typical sentence would be: "Amy's mother expects her to be ready at 16:00 for their visit at the nearby farm." (New words: expects, ready, visit, nearby, farm.)

6. Only when she shows that she can read (and understand) the new words in context, do we read the actual book: first together (i.e. I read and she follows with her finger) and then she reads it aloud by herself. By this time, she can usually read it reasonably fluently.

7. Homework: The last exercise is a comprehension: I type the whole passage, but leave out words for her to fill in from the text in the book. The words to be filled in are mostly high frequency words like "ago", "again" etc. rather than difficult words. Then I ask a few questions to determine comprehension:"Why did the family move the farm?" "When did they move to the farm?" Amy finds these questions still very hard, but we are getting there. I think it is very important that all reading should be linked to comprehension as well.

I know this method works - not only for Amy. I also did it with small groups in my class last year and then words were vere basic. First set of words: fat, cat, mat, hat, man, sat. With these words we made sentences like" fat cat sat on man" "fat man sat on hat" (Who sat on the man? Where did the man sit etc.)

Isn't teaching just the greatest job? Especially if there are no playground duty and staff meetings!