Introduction of sight words

I decided I needed to jump on in with my research and get started, with or without all of the consent forms. I actually received two more today, so I am only missing two. I am doing my research with 6 students during our small group reading block each day. One student was absent today, so I began with a group of five. I introduced the first five sight words on the Dolch list. These words include: a, the, of, to, and. These students have been working on these words since the beginning of the year and still have not mastered them. The students in this group are considered at-risk for developing reading difficulties in the future based on their MAP scores, PAST and Phonics assessments, and formative assessments within the classroom. To introduce each word I used flashcards that I have made for this small group. Each student gets a set of cards and we spell, read, and write the word that we see on each card. When spelling the words today we used sign language that I have taught the entire class and we "air" write the words. Each week when introducing the words I will use some kind of multi sensory activity.

After spelling, reading, and writing all five words we went through each card and read the words quickly. I explained to the students that sight words are words they need to know in a snap. At the end of the lesson, I took the cards and flashed them to each student individually so they could practice the words. I used this as a quick assessment. There were two students that were able to recall all five words. Ben missed "and" and "of", Jon missed "of", and Ted missed "the". When they missed the word, I stopped them and gave them the correct answer and then asked them to repeat me. This is a strategy that I recently learned called constant time delay. I have documented this data on a chart using a (+) when they read a word correctly and a (-) when they read a word incorrectly.

I am anxious to see the progress my students make with this daily sight word instruction. Tomorrow I will introduce their first sight word readers that will include the words we are learning this week.  I feel like I will need to develop an organizational system to keep up with the words we are working on, the sight word readers, and a good monitoring tool that will work for me.