For most parents, their ultimate goal is to ensure that their children are ready for college. It will intrigue you to find out that college readiness can begin from kindergarten! If you would like your child to succeed academically as well as in life, they need to know how to read. There are a number of ways of cultivating a confident reader. One of these is using sight words. These sight words enable a child to identify words and thus enabling them to decode the words that they do not know. So what is the importance of teaching sight words to your pre-k child?
They help pre-k children decode what they are reading
Sight words are important as they help in the decoding process. When a child is handed a book and they feel that they can comprehend some of the test, they will want to try to understand the rest. This is a much better approach rather than having a child simply see words on a page and feel lost in trying to decode each one. Without sight words, kids can easily get lost in the decoding process and lose all meaning to the text that is in front of them. With sight words, emphasis is placed on trying to comprehend each word rather than being faced with the task of trying to understand complete sentences all at once. The great thing about this is that the kids shift their sights to trying to understand individual words and this will greatly improve on their comprehension as a whole.
They build a foundation for pre-k kids to learn complex words
Sight words are not simply used in helping children learn how to read. They go a long way in teaching kids how to identify complex words, as they grow older. This builds a strong reading foundation that they will use throughout their lives. The moment a child learns a sight word, they get the chance to learn the meaning, the pronunciation as well as the spelling of the word. The merging of these three comes from their basic knowledge of the alphabet. By learning and practicing the various sight words, the children grow their vocabulary as the process is now ingrained in the way they read.
Just as children learn their names through repetition, the same applies with sight words. Once the pre-k kids know how to identify their names, they can now begin identifying the different Dolch words that are frequently used as sight words. Some of the most commonly taught Dolch words include a, and, is, it, in, to, two, I and many more. For more information, contact establishments like Hopskotch Kindergarten.