Literacy Website Review # 4 {Fry Sight Words}

Many students with language disorders have co-occurring learning disabilities in the areas of reading and writing. They need direct intervention to increase their reading decoding, sight word recognition, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. 

Students need practice to improve their automaticity for oral reading of sight words. Recently, I have been thinking of ways to support the special education teachers' goal of improving the reading skills of students with reading disabilities and language disorders.  Sometimes the progress is slower than we would anticipate and we are eager to close the gap when the kids are reading several grade levels behind. We discussed that the students really need to improve their sight word recognition of Fry words. Research shows that students need to read the first 300 by 3rd grade and 1000 words in 4th and 5th grade to successfully read on grade level. 

I was going to make flash cards for students to take home for practice and then I stumbled across the website: http://www.uniqueteachingresources.com/Fry-1000-Instant-Words.html

The Unique Teaching Resources website is awesome because it has the Fry words flashcards for 1000 high frequency words already created! Plus, there are progress monitoring checklists for all the words. I especially like that the words are divided into sets of 10 and 20 words based on the needs of students that you are working with. 

This is an excellent resource to share with parents for them to encourage their kids to practice their sight words. If you have a literacy night at your school, this is a great website to share with parents and staff to access the FREE and beneficial resources! 

An added bonus on this website is that it includes 100 nouns with pictures. This is great to use with language disordered kids who are building their receptive and expressive vocabulary skills. 

In a special education classroom, students sometimes practice their sight words online via a power point presentation of words. However, I think is important for  them to also have access to practice their sight words with flash cards when they are on the go. They can practice reading on the bus, in the car, at home easily without having to turn on a computer. Yes I do love technology. However, I also believe back to the basics instruction is needed as well. 

Students in K-2nd generally practice their sight words with hands on flash cards or other word work activities when they are learning to read. What about students in grades 3-5 or even middle and high school who are reading below grade level? They still need intervention to improve their sight word recognition and reading decoding even though they are expected at that level to read to learn. But what happens when they still need to learn sight words? Special education teachers need to make remediating this area a priority and not just teach comprehension strategies and the grade level standards despite time constraints. Yes, kids need to learning comprehension strategies but they must learn sight word and how to decode words too! 

This educational literacy website is created by a teacher for other educators and it is definitely jam packed with great FREE literacy resources along with some lesson plans available for purchase. 

The website does not directly share other ideas for students to learn sight words other than flash cards. However, they can play games such as BINGO, Go Fish, and Memory to practice this skill. Dr. Edward Fry's book is the perfect resource for this.
(Dr. Fry's 1000 Instant Words: The Most Common Words for Teaching Reading, Writing, & Spelling). You can view a preview here:books.google.com/books?isbn=1576907570


Here is a great website if you would like to see the Fry word lists as related to the Common Core Standards for K-5th grade. http://www.k12reader.com/subject/vocabulary/fry-words/

I like that the K12 reader website reminds you to have students practice their reading sight words in contexts of sentences, paragraphs, and writing the words as well. 

Thanks for reading the blog today!

* Tamara Anderson
BSL Speech & Language