How much emphasis is given to sight-word recognition during the Pre-School Course?
Comparatively little, although we believe it to be an important part of the whole package. Many of the words which crop up in children’s early reading material are irregular. For example, ‘come’, ‘you’ and ‘was’ can’t be worked out by saying the sounds – children need to learn to recognise them as a whole unit. We spend just a few minutes of each session looking at our ‘Word of the Week’ and thinking of sentences to use it in context. By introducing these high-usage words, we are looking to give the children a more balanced overall picture of the reading process than they would otherwise have by learning phonics alone. Although phonics is the most important tool in learning to read, it is important that children develop a strategy of looking at whole words first to see if they recognise them, before trying to decode them using their phonic skills.
