http://www.mrsperkins.com/what_are_dolch_words.html
Has anyone specifically taught their LOs the Dolch list of 220 sight words?
Any thoughts on them?
It seems like there are way too many to make a category out of them, and I don’t know if they are related to each other very much.
Plus, I think the majority of these words are not simple nouns.
How does one approach teaching not-so-simple nouns? Does that come much later in a reading education?
TIA
I have been teaching these words mostly in sentences as they are very common words to make simple sentences with. Most of them are also not phonetical. Some of them (I believe there are a large number of colours) can be taught with that category. They are very hard words to explain (a, the etc) so putting them in a category may seem boring unless your child is very young - mine asks “where are the pictures” even if we are only doing the phonics flash.
Despite this by doing sentences and then asking her to choose some of the words (including some of the Dolch words) she does know a large number of them already.
I looked at the list as a review after you teach them to read many other words then review the list to see what you need to work on. There are categories involving Dolch words already but they are simply list of the words.
http://forum.brillkids.com/downloads/?sa=view;id=6921
and here are the Fry words
http://forum.brillkids.com/downloads/?sa=view;id=7146
http://forum.brillkids.com/downloads/?sa=view;id=7148
http://forum.brillkids.com/downloads/?sa=view;id=7150
Mom2Ross,
I’ve been trying to teach my DD the dolch list. I started teaching my DD later than many on this forum. We started 10 months ago, when my daughter was 23 months old. It has been difficult because she is in a willful stage of her life. Consequently I usually don’t get to teach what I want. Instead I work on what she wants to do and just hope that it is enough. Once she knew plently of nouns and verbs, I introduced her first dolch word. I started withmthe word “like” because it fit well with her favorite animal and food words. I hung it on the refrigerator and we read it often that day. Then we just went right into sentences - “I like cats, I like grapes,” etc. Then we added another dolch word and focused more on combinations with her favorite verbs - “I like to eat pizza, I like to jump”, etc. Then added another dolch word for another layer … “I can jump like a frog,” etc. Now we are up to 20 dolch words. As you can see I don’t try categorize the dolch words. Instead I just introduce words that can form sentences with the nouns and verbs that she has learned already. When she is willing I teach them 3 different ways. I flash them very quickly in a little reader playlist. I make sentences with them, and we point them out while reading together. Again my daughter is very willful so many days we don’t work on them at all. But when she asks to do her little reader work we try to flash them individually and read some of them in a sentence. Usually I am reading the sentence and she is following along. I try to focus on teaching her rather than pressuring her to read by herself. My daughter loves books and never refuses them so I read to her nearly every day. We go the library every 2 weeks and get a pile of 10 to 12 books from the new reader section. They are usually easier to read than the beautiful picture books. They use many words from the dolch list and use a predictable format to help kids have a sucessful read. I used to agonize over which books are best. Now I just grab enough books that some should be good. Lately I use the good books as my guide for which dolch words to try next. Then I know I will have at least one good book to reinforce the new words. My daughter doesn’t read indepedently yet but she can point out her words in books. I am usually doing the reading and she is just following along with my finger but she is learning. Even when I create a sentence using words that she certainly recognizes, she often can’t read it. I think that she has too many similiar words swirling around in her brain but I can see recognition in her eyes while I’m reading to her. So I just read it to her, sometimes afterwards she will point out the words that she recognizes. I’m at a stage where I feel a need to slow down to let her digest everything. She even refused all reading activities recently for a short awhile so I completely stopped everything until she began asking me for reading lessons on the computer. I believe it will come together eventually. I’m pretty confident that she will at least enter kindergarten being able to read already and probably before pre-K.
I think that you will have an easier time of it since you are starting younger. I didn’t start the dolch list until she already recognized enough verbs and nouns to put together a variety of sentences. I may have been starting the sentences a bit early but Doman recommends moving onto sentences faster with toddlers her age. Anyway I don’t feel that I’m solidly on our way towards independent reading yet. But we are way ahead of the average toddler of her age. This forum can be very humbling because there are so many astonishingly brilliant kids. But I think as long as you and I keep at it, that we will be sucessful. Doman did say that all of the parents who consistently taught reading were sucessful regardless of what method was utilized - very reassuring. I cling to that thought often.
Good Luck and Have Fun, Lori