A: In general, I am not a huge fan of “worksheets.” Having said that, however, all paper and pencil activities are not bad! Games and other such activities are wonderful for teaching and reinforcing reading concepts. Any time we can use a game to teach, the better! Part of the reason this is true is that the child will anticipate learning with interest rather than dreading it, but also if the child is playing a game or participating in an activity, she will be an active learner. She won’t have the opportunity to just sit and let others around her participate.
An amazing resource to use along with our sight word picture cards is The Reading Teacher’s Encyclopedia. We call it an encyclopedia because it is packed full of games and activities to use while you teach the sight words. Best of all, it includes all the most important elements of reading: fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, phonics, phonemic awareness, and writing. Find out more information about this resource now!
In fact, if you use SnapWords™ (sight word picture cards), The Illustrated Book of Sounds & Their Spelling Patterns, and the Encyclopedia all together, you will be taking care of learning sight words, learning phonics and spelling, and the other elements of reading and writing, including comprehension, phonemic awareness, etc.
Finally, please take advantage of all the information, how-to’s, and activity ideas found here on our blog. Browse by topic by choosing a category from the left. And if you have specific comments or questions, leave a comment or email me at sarah(at)child-1st(dot)com. Let’s all keep on helping our children love learning!
A: I have heard this comment more times than I could possibly tell. The very best way to teach words and have that learning transfer into USE is to use the SnapWords™ (sight word picture cards) with your child. The reason is that as you show a child the card and let him really look at it, talking about the images just like you would as you read him a picture book, his brain actually snaps a picture of the word complete with image. As you talk about what is going on, he is also associating the meaning of the word (comprehension help!) as he learns to recognize the word in print.
To transfer that to writing, I would suggest:
If you do this activity on a regular basis, the child will learn to rely more and more heavily on his powerful sense of visualization.
Following is another tremendous help that I have used with students with great success; it helps with spelling words correctly in writing.
After introducing sight words a few minutes a day, consider teaching your child the construction of words using The Illustrated Book of Sounds & Their Spelling Patterns.
This book is leveled and will teach all the sound spelling from K through adult words, but it uses a fun format of cartoons and humor; children and young people love lessons in this format. If you teach the sight words and then follow the format and the sequence that is suggested in the book, you will help your child soar in reading in about 35 minutes a day!
A: Phonics rules fall squarely into left-brained territory which is difficult for right-brain dominant children, many of whom struggle with reading as a result. How do we get around that? We use right-brained elements to teach spelling and phonics. This is not a crutch! Far from it! What we do when we link left-brained elements to right-brained strategies is that we strengthen the communication between the hemispheres in the brain and we help strengthen a child’s abilities in working within their areas of weakness! When I taught school, I used right-brained strategies with ALL my students because those left-brainers needed the depth of meaning they acquired from the right-brained strategies we used. This helped them with meaning and comprehension even if they were not struggling to recognize words as they read. And, of course, including right-brained strategies helped those students who naturally rely more on their right hemisphere.
A couple of the materials I developed in my classroom to reach both left- and right-brained learners include the SnapWords™ sight word cards and The Illustrated Book of Sounds & Their Spelling Patterns. Use these two resources together: introduce sight words first, then add a lesson from the book. Teaching this way will mean that you are covering sight word acquisition AND teaching spelling and phonics, all in a right-brain friendly way.
A: I have had personal experience with teaching ESOL children using the sight word picture cards. The children loved them! The visuals helped children who had no English at all figure out what the words said (especially when we added the gestures!). At first when we played our games, many of the students would point to a word and say it in their own language. I thought this was super cool because what it told me was that they understood the meaning of the word! This taught me that the images went a long way in helping prevent comprehension issues. Next, they would start to say the words in English. I had all the words I owned plastered all over the walls of my classroom. The children used them for help as they were writing in English. The wonderful thing was that after they had written using the stylized words as prompts, if I asked them to read me what they wrote, they could! What I learned from this is that the images helped them learn the words, but they could read them in plain text as well.
A: I love this topic! New learners are right in the developmental stage in which their right hemisphere is rapidly developing. What this means for us as parents and teachers is that the most efficient way to teach sight words to beginners or to teach reading to beginners is through pictures, body movement, story, metaphor, humor, color and more! This is why Child1st exists as a company. Once we found out how effective these teaching vehicles are with beginners and with other older visual learners, we were on fire! I am passionate about catching these young learners before they experience difficulty and become discouraged.
Read more about fun and easy ways to teach very young children.
Also check out our kit for teaching reading to K through 1st grade.
A: Many, many visual learners and right-brained learners are very bright. They come across as not bright when they are asked to do things that are very hard for them, such as work with symbols (1,2,3, A, B,C) and formulas and rules--in short, anything that involves a symbol or that requires memorization. The good news is that these children learn very quickly and efficiently when the materials they're using have elements that tie (left-brained) symbols to (right-brained) other elements such as pictures, body movement, story, metaphor, humor, color and more.
Read about how hemispheric dominance affects a child's ability to learn to read.
Check out our SnapWords™ cards that tie left-brained symbols to right-brained images and body movement.
A: Our company exists to create materials that will support you as you teach children to read. The reason so many children struggle is because they need something more than the plain words. The evidence that this is true lies in the numbers of children who struggle with reading, don’t enjoy it, can’t read, or can’t make sense out of what they read. This includes many children that have been identified with specific learning challenges such as dyslexia, autism, ADHD, and more.
To learn more about how to help these struggling readers learn sight words, read this short blog post.
Also, check out what this parent said about the difference our SnapWords™ cards made with her non-reader.
I have experienced astonishing results over the past 12 years when I used sight words with pictures embedded in them to teach beginners or those who have struggled with reading. Whether tutoring one child, working with a small group learning to read or remediate reading, or teaching full classrooms—the results have been amazing in terms of the rapidity with which the children learned their high frequency words!
How it happened
It all began 12 years ago when I was teaching kindergarten. We’d work on learning a word using a phonetic approach of having the children decode the word; this traditional approach to teaching reading simply did NOT work with this particular group of kindergarteners. It got to be November and they were still painfully sounding out everything they came to. There were issues with this process that varied from child to child. Some could sound out the word and then say the whole word; others could sound out the word and then they said a word that started with the final sound instead of the first one. Still others would sound out the word and then look puzzled when it came time to say the word. The last issue we had was that the child would sound out and name the word correctly, but two seconds later, he’d act as if he’d never seen the word in his life.
Needless to say, reading was NOT FUN for these children, nor for their teacher. In desperation one day I began to focus on finding an approach to teaching sight words that might work better. So the process of designing pictures embedded in sight words began. It was a really great time for me because the children collaborated with me by giving me feedback on which words worked and which did not. The really cool thing was that my students began to rapidly learn words and recall them. They finally understood that reading meant not just sounding out words but really meant both recognizing words and knowing what they mean.
By March, this group of beginners could read all the Dolch words with pictures that I had created. ALL of them! Their reading level shot way up as well because as they learned the sight words from the cards with pictures, we also taught phonics concepts and sound spellings so that they were getting the best of both worlds: phonics instruction and instant whole word recognition.
I was so puzzled at why the sight word pictures worked so well and so quickly. I made a point of asking each time I was surprised again, “How did you know that word?” And invariably the answer had something very specific to do with the picture in the sight word. They would still see the sight word complete with embedded picture even though they were no longer looking at the picture! To me this is purely magical!
Over the years, others have reported having a similar experience with teaching their reluctant readers.
Here's one comment we recently heard from a parent: “I am pleased to say that my son for the first time said the other day that he actually is liking to read. He had struggled with his sight words since beginning to read. He heavily uses his phonetics and can read very large words, but has always had a problem with the sight words. Since getting the sight words and sentence book over Christmas break, we started to use the cards when we started back to school in Jan. He is reading so well and we are on list C already and almost done with it. He is reading much more fluently. Thank you so much, this has truly been a blessing for all of us. God bless your day.” --Judy
Why do sight word pictures work?
It is my theory that any child who struggles with learning to read needs to have other pathways to the brain besides being told what a word says or being taught how to sound out words. Those who struggle with reading all benefit tremendously from the pictures in the words because what happens is that their brains work like little cameras that snap pictures of the words complete with visuals and store the words away. So when the children encounter the word in reading later, what brings the word to mind is the whole picture that is stored in their brains. They actually report being able to still “see” the sight word picture.
The sight word picture cards also improve reading comprehension because the picture on the front combined with the word used in a sentence on the reverse of the card gives a context to the sight word and makes the learner focus on the meaning of the word and how to use it correctly. This automatically improves reading comprehension!
Finally, the body motion attached to each sight word picture provides yet another pathway into the brain—the brain learns when the body moves.
Here is an example:
In this sight word picture card, we have the word O’CLOCK with visuals embedded in it. Children love to inspect this picture because it has a spider in it, the little mouse is perched on the clock, and the pendulum is almost swinging for real! Elements in this picture that help the child remember the spelling of the word are that the clocks are both O’s in the word. They remember the spider web that is connecting the “o’cl” in the word. Notice also that the black letters in the word look somewhat similar. Both segments have a C and then a tall letter in them. Pretty cool, right?
The back of this card looks like this:
o’clock
Sentence: "O'CLOCK. Both clocks on the wall say it is eight O'CLOCK."
Body Motion: With your elbow up and palm down,
make a pendulum that swings.
The sentence that includes the sight word refers to the picture that contains two clocks, the clocks the children just saw in the sight word picture. Next, their body motion is mimicking the swing of the pendulum. They are having a full body, fun, engaging learning experience that only took a few seconds!
When I was a Title 1 teacher, our motto was “work smarter, not harder.” This motto was prominently displayed in my room because my goal was that the students realize that their style of learning was just fine. It only makes sense to work smarter—in other words, most consistent with how the brain learns best—than to spend so many hours ineffectively drilling and drilling!
The side benefit is that when students begin to succeed at learning, several really wonderful things happen.
It is so worthwhile to see a student go from discouraged defeat to successful enthusiasm. It is like seeing a rebirth. For me, there truly is very little more rewarding than having a small part in this process.
Something I discovered during my years as a classroom teacher is that it works so well to pre-teach specific sight words and sound spellings (phonics concepts) using a big book as the children are sitting around you on a rug. Rather than jumping right in and reading the story to them or with them, pre-teach and give them the lay of the land ahead of time. Doing this will help the focus concepts jump off the page and reading the story will be more successful.
Following is one way to teach sight words and sound spellings using a big book. We are going to use the story A Moose Is Loose, and the mini-lessons will last for a week because there are so many concepts to teach in this story!
A snapshot of the concepts taught from this story
Long U and OO spellings:
OO – moose, loose, scoop, troop, rooting, hoot, snoozing, roosting, soon.
EW – newspaper, flew, crew, knew, stew, new.
OE – shoes, canoe.
O – to, do.
-UE – cue, blue, glue.
UI – suit, fruit, cruise.
Compound Word – Newspaper
Adding –ING – rooting, roosting, snoozing
Sight Words – By the time the children get to this story, they will have already learned and practiced all the sight words in List B, so it is a matter of reviewing and searching for the words that appear in this story.
Words included in List B:
am, ask, be, cut, got, him, into, its, let, run, us, yes, away, from, funny, may, must, of, put, say, that, them, they, went, any, fly, just, last, many, she, show, than, try, what, when, why, ate, fast, good, our, pull, saw, sing, then, too, took, who, with, about, all, eat, gave, new, read, still, take, tell, work, your
Basic Procedures
Day 1, introduce the book title page and ask the children what they think the story is going to be about based on the title.
Next, display this chart.
Tell the children you are going to be looking for words that have the OO sound as in the word MOO! But there are different ways to spell that sound, so each day when you read the book together you will be hunting for a particular sound. When you have found the words that match that sound spelling, you will write them on the chart.
Day 1, hunt for OO and O words. You can use colored film to put over those words in the big book so they will stand out nicely when you read.
Day 2, search for EW words and even during other times of the day when you find another EW word, add it to the chart.
Day 3, add the OE words.
Day 4, add UI words.
Day 5, add UE words.
Follow-up Activities
Days 1- 2, practice adding -ING to words such as RUN, SNAP, FAN, PLAN, SLAM, CHAT, TAP, and CLAP. Say that if you just stuck the -ING on the end of the word, the I would reach around and pinch the vowel, making it yell its name (FAN would become FANING, PLAN would become PLANING, etc.), so you have to double the final letter.
Days 3- 4, add -ING to these words: name, tame, flame, rake, wake, wait, yank, tramp, call, salt, etc. These words either already have a Pinchy E making the first vowel long, OR they have two consonants at the end of the word that prevent the I in -ING from pinching them. So NAME becomes NAMING (remove the final e), TAME becomes TAMING, BLAME becomes BLAMING, CAMP becomes CAMPING, FALL becomes FALLING, etc.
Day 5, practice compound words. Break up the following compound words into single words and write each word on an index card. Write words that begin a compound word in one color and words that end the word in another color (example: AIRPORT becomes AIR PORT). Here are the words: anyone, baseball, bedroom, cookbook, daylight, dugout, football, forever, itself, into, inside, indoor, himself, homework, hilltop, herself, haircut, jellyfish, maybe, myself, nobody, outside, rainfall, rosebud, sailboat, seashell, seesaw. Have the child use the cards to put small words together to make compound words. Of course each compound word they make will have one red word and one blue one.
Example page from Day 1 when you are highlighting OO spellings
On the following days, you would add colored film to the words that contain the sound spellings you are focusing on.
After reading, talk about the plot. What would the children have done had they been the newspaper reporter who was called on to help with the animals that got loose? What solution would they have created? It would be fun for the children to WRITE an alternate solution. They can use the words in this story as references for spelling.
Most of all, have fun with the story and for sure, love learning!
As is often the case when we discuss people in terms of classification, we tend to over generalize and label people. This is certainly the case when discussing right- or left-brain dominance. I would love to have a dime for every time I’ve heard someone say, “I’m right-brained” or “I’m left-brained.” When I hear those terms, a picture flashes into my head of a hemisphere in the brain running around on little legs and bare feet.
The fact is, we think and learn using both sides of our brain. Having said that, however, it is a fact that each of us has a dominant hemisphere that dictates our learning strengths, impacts our view of the world, and determines how we function in it. It is particularly important, then, for us as parents and teachers to understand our children’s dominant learning styles and adjust our practice to those preferences. If we don’t, chances are very good that the children will struggle with academics to one extent or another.
The functions of the hemispheres
A person’s dominant hemisphere is usually the one that processes incoming information, and the less dominant hemisphere can be strengthened through practice. If we want to help our children learn to the best of their abilities, it will naturally help for us to know which are their dominant hemispheres, and which are their less dominant ones. Armed with this knowledge, we can teach new information in a way that is best received by their dominant hemispheres, and then we can review or practice that information in ways that involve their less dominant hemispheres. Doing this will strengthen the connection between hemispheres and improve the children’s ability to do well with reading.
The hemispheres go to school
Academic skills associated with the left hemisphere include:
Academic skills associated with the right hemisphere include:
(See Unicorns are Real: A Right-Brained Approach to Learning by Barbara Meister Vitale, p 11)
Hemisphere dominance and reading
Hemispheric dominance has everything to do with learning to read. This might explain why so many, many children are struggling to learn to read and why some don’t learn. In spite of our society's focus on trying to make sure every child learns to read, we have not yet embraced the notion that maybe it is not our children that are at fault when they don’t learn to read but is instead the fact that we often continue to insist on a wholly left-brained approach to teaching reading. Also very much to the point is that when children are entering school, they are at a developmental stage in which their right hemispheres are developing rapidly; this means that children at the age for learning to read are not as developed in their left hemispheres!
This left-brained approach has been in place for decades; it has been endorsed and blessed by national associations, and it is taught in all our teaching colleges. It is no wonder that we educators are comfortable in believing that this method of teaching reading is right. But what follows that assumption is that children who cannot learn in that universally accepted way of teaching reading are broken, disabled, and incapable. Sadly, it is one reason why thousands of people grow to adulthood unable to read.
Specifics of how teaching reading is related to hemispheric dominance
1. The traditional way to teach reading is from part to whole using specified sequences of learning. We teach in little steps and expect the child to remember the little pieces until he gets to words in a book. This is perfect for dominant left-brained children! Right-brain dominant children take in information exactly the opposite way. They work from whole to part. What does this mean really? Right-brain dominant children must first see the final product, the goal, the whole thing, and the whole pattern; only then can they make up a way of learning and remembering. If you give a right-brained learner a sequence of little steps to learn, he cannot learn them well because this is not how his brain processes. He will be unable to remember the steps because he needs the final product in order to make sense of the steps. The perfect way to send a right-brained child into a coma during language arts is to ask him to learn the blends, for instance (bl, pl, pr, sl, sw, etc.)
2. Left-brain dominant learners think just fine using symbols. Right-brain dominant learners learn most easily through touch, the senses, and body movement. Their strong suit is not paper and pencil exercises. Phonics worksheets fall perfectly into this category of activities that are difficult for right-brained learners.
3. Left-brain dominant learners are most secure when they have a sequence to follow. For example, step by step directions, guidelines, rules of thumb, and details they can check off. Right-brain dominant learners are random in how they perceive. With these children, it works really well to surround them with learning and let them notice patterns and make connections.
4. For instance, it is the rule in most classrooms that the teacher should teach words in a particular sequence and only put on the word wall the words as dictated by school or district. Because I am a right-brained person myself, my classroom walls were covered with words from day 1. Literally every wall had words. Some were high-frequency words in alphabetical order, others were huge words grouped by part of speech (that were considered way above the grade level of my students). What I found was that my little rebellion worked in the favor of the children in my classroom who automatically began noticing patterns in words (the “part” in the phrase “from whole to part.”) They noticed, for example, that the “tion” in “nation” showed up in really big words like “vacation” or “abdication” and because they noticed this on their own, they remembered it.
5. Left-brain dominant learners are logical and work through a problem step by step. They start with a little tidbit and begin to logic through to the answer. “If this is fact, then this is also fact.” Right-brain dominant learners rely a lot on their intuition. Where this becomes a problem for them is when they have to explain or justify their answer using words. For example, a right-brain dominant child might solve a math problem by visualizing images or shapes in his mind, but when it comes to translating images he saw in his head into words and words in a sequence, he will likely struggle.
6. Left-brain dominant learners are usually quite verbal. They usually acquire and recall words a plenty. They think in words, or so I’m told. Right-brained dominant learners are not primarily verbal. The stronger the image in their mind, the more important the concept is to them, the less they will be able to translate that into words. Let them draw a picture or make something with their hands to show what they see. Interestingly enough, some right-brain dominant people can communicate in words best when they can write or type—it is a tactile activity that frees their mind from the need to verbalize the words, which I suppose adds an extra layer of left-brainedness to the process.
7. Left-brain dominant learners can hear, absorb, and deal with abstractions. By this I mean things like math rules, equations, phonics rules, spelling sequences (letter sequences). You can give them a rule, which is an abstract concept, and they can remember it and apply it to a problem in their homework. Right-brain dominant learners do not learn this way. They do not handle abstracts. They need examples, analogies, stories that explain why, and a habit of relating to known objects to help them remember abstract facts.
How do I know if I have a right-brain dominant child?
Good question! I’m so glad you asked! First of all, make a habit to pay very close attention to your child. A dominant right-brain child will:
You might find it helpful to help your child take a casual online quiz that will point you in a direction of which hemisphere is dominant. Of course I am not sure how utterly scientific this test is, but I did take it myself.
It was no surprise to find out that I am 5 parts left-brained to 15 parts right-brained!
I have a right-brained dominant child. So where do I go from here?
While most of the traditional teaching materials are geared perfectly to left-brain dominant learners, there is hope for your right-brain dominant children. Here are some suggestions for helping right-brained learners read.
1. Start with whole words. Talk about what the word looks like. Use it in a sentence or five. Have your child come up with a body motion that reflects the meaning or shape of the word. Find the word in books. Have your child write it and draw a picture of it or build it out of materials of some kind. Or, check out our sight word cards that already include pictures and body motions.
2. Post the words on the walls of your school room. Post LOTS of words. For instance, if you introduce the word PLAY, post lots of words that have the AY ending. If you introduce OVER, post other words that have the ER ending. Never introduce a piece of learning in isolation from other similar or related items.
3. If you introduce small words such as PLAY or OVER, play around with bigger words that contain those smaller words such as PLAYGROUND or OVERPASS.
4. Introduce words from a story well loved by your child. You do not have to introduce particular words in a particular sequence. Your child might want to learn DINOSAUR first. So, do that word first! Whatever the child’s brain is captured by, he will learn and remember.
5. Use drawing every day. I always began school with very young children by giving them lots of coloring and drawing implements in flat boxes that allowed for easy access. Avoid broken or grimy crayons! Let the child draw whatever is on his mind and then begin to work on labeling the picture. For instance, if your child draws a dinosaur in his back yard, ask him what he drew and how he would like to label the picture. If he says, “I have a dinosaur for a pet,” help him write those words, and then put any word that is new on a card on the wall. This is how many young children acquire the ability to read.
6. Look for teaching materials that utilize images, body movement, rhyme, and other right-brained teaching elements.
7. And finally, do all you can to affirm the beautiful design of your child’s mind!
Check out these alphabet materials for right-brained learners.
Find out more about whole words with pictures.
Read about this effective reading program for right-brained learners.
