Making Sight Words Teaching Word Recognition from Phoneme Awareness to Fluency (2nd Edition)

Making Sight Words focuses on the central task for beginners: learning to read words. Most texts on teaching children to read lean heavily on philosophical speculation rather than on reading research, and they recycle failed practices from the past along with fruitless fads from contemporary practice. This book tells the exciting story emerging from reading research of how beginners can learn to read words effortlessly and automatically, not by memorization, but by understanding their alphabetic mappings. Readers will learn to guide beginners in their journey from phoneme awareness to accurate, reliable decoding, and from there to the effortless word recognition of fluent reading, which undergirds reading comprehension. Making Sight Words translates research into practical strategies to help children recognize new words thoroughly, efficiently, and permanently. Making Sight Words features an unusual organization into expository chapters and practical chapters. The twelve expository chapters deal with broad questions about what to teach and why. The book explains a powerful theory for understanding how children develop the ability to read words, and then explains the research on how children can reach the milestones of phoneme awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. The nine practical chapters show how to carry out the work of teaching reading effectively. They show how to motivate reading and to support word learning as children read aloud; how to teach phonics with letterbox lessons; how to guide the development of reading fluency; and how to teach spelling as wordmapping. These chapters include simple assessments to monitor children’s progress in learning to read.