Why Can’t My Child Retain Sight Words?

By Dawn Ilardi | October 18, 2024

It can be so confusing when you review letters or sight words over and over with your child, but they don’t stick. It’s especially hard to understand when your child easily remembers the things they enjoy. How can this be?

When a child is struggling to make progress in reading, it’s likely because there are gaps in early foundational skills. They may need to strengthen these skills before they can move forward. Memorizing sight words may not be the best approach.

Let’s review how literacy skills unfold, and maybe you can see the point at which things started to get difficult for your child:

RHYMING sounds:
- A preschool child should recognize patterns in rhyming words. To explore this, give your child examples and ask them to say “yes” or “no” about whether they rhyme (e.g., bat/fat, lug/bug, pit/shoe, fog/fan). Can they generate their own rhyming words?
ALPHABET song:
- Did your child have trouble learning to say or sing the alphabet? What about popular nursery rhymes and other children’s songs?
RECOGNIZE letters:
- If you show your child a group of 3-5 capital letters and ask them to point to the letter you name… how do they do? Now slowly increase the number of letters in front of them…. What about lower case letters?
NAMING letters:
- With those letters in front of them, your child should now be able to call out the name of each letter. At first, they might mix up some letters that look similar (b, d). But this should improve with review. Over time, letter naming should be fast and automatic.
Letter SOUNDS:
- Your child should be able to point to the letter when you call out letter sound. For example, if you say “what letter makes the “b” sound like in ball”, they should point correctly.
- Now ask them to name the letter sounds….
- Your child will learn that letters can have more than one sound. Such as the with the letter “a” in the words, “apple” vs “baby” vs “talk”.
HANDWRITING:
- Your child needs to explicitly learn how to form letters and place them correctly on the line, and later space them correctly.
Letter sound for BLENDS and DIGRAPHS:
- Your child will learn about letter blends, when the individual letters still say their own sounds (e.g., dr, bl, st).
- Digraphs are those when the letters stick together to make one sound (e.g., sh, th, wh).
SPELLING rules and patterns:
- As phonological skills grow, the rules and patterns for spelling also need to be taught explicitly.
SIGHT word memorization:
- Some words that occur very frequently in English or those that are non-phonetic or irregular need to be memorized. Your child should be able to apply decoding skills to most new words without having to memorize all of them.
Word SYLLABLES:
- Your child should recognize and use word syllables to decode words. This is a word or part of a word with one vowel sound. This strategy is very helpful for longer words. There are patterns in how these occur (e.g., silent e, closed vowel, etc).
PHONOLOGICAL awareness:
- A phoneme is the smallest unit of speech that distinguishes one utterance from another. There is a developmental continuum for phonemic awareness and how these should be taught (rhyming > sentence segmenting > syllable segmenting/blending > blend/segment phonemes > phoneme isolation…….. phoneme manipulation and reversal). Ideally, these should be taught using multiple senses (touch, hear, see, feel).

Difficulty learning sight words can be a sign that earlier stages of reading were not mastered.

Some schools do not teach phonological awareness and instead they rely heavily on teaching sight words. This can really impact spelling too. But if your child was exposed to phonological awareness activities at school and still struggling, it’s likely that your child did not progress quickly enough. At risk readers need structured literacy, and they can only progress when they have mastered the basics.

Did you know that learning disorders in reading (Dyslexia) are genetic? Do you know of other biological family members who were slow learning to read, or maybe they dislike reading as an adult? Some adults with dyslexia learned to overcome early difficulties, but they may not be good spellers. If dyslexia or reading difficulties run in your family, your child may also be at risk.

Teaching an at risk reader requires specialized training. This is not something you can tackle during homework each night. You will need the school team to support your child with more resources.

If you are concerned that your child may need more help, don’t delay and talk with the teacher and administrators at school.

Can you get the school to complete a psychoeducational evaluation?
Can the school go ahead and start giving your child extra help in reading? Do you anticipate any delays with this?
Does your school provide reading instruction with structured literacy? If not, what kind of reading instruction?

If you have concerns about getting your child evaluated or helping them gain access to reading instruction that works, contact us to learn more about our evaluation services: [email protected]