| Every year I have
some parents worry that their child is ‘just memorizing’ the
self-selected books that come home at the beginning of the year. I
always tell the children that I WANT them to memorize as many words as
they possibly can. Memorizing words is actually what reading is all
about! The words they have already memorized include their name, names
of family members, hopefully the word wall words that have been
introduced, and words like CAT and DOG and MOM and DAD. An adult
sight-word vocabulary is really all of the words we have committed to
memory since we began learning to read too. Please don’t think that is
the only skill I am teaching your children. We work very hard on
phoenemic awareness activities (auditory speech sounds) as well as a
daily dose (actually many daily doses) of phonics (connecting the
auditory speech sounds to the visual cueing system-letters), not only in
their daily reading, but in their daily writing activities as well so
that they are well-equipped to take on words they haven’t committed to
memory as they read and write. They are also learning other strategies
that will help them decode words they don’t know-like ’picture cues’,
’skip-it’, ’think-it-out’, and many more.
Even if your child doesn’t know
all of the words in their Summer Stories book (even all of the words in
the ones we’ve worked on in class), please know that your child is
probably working on ‘tracking’ (noticing word boundaries) which is a
precursor to beginning to read.
Worry Not-Memorizing is GOOD! I
have the children REWIND their reading to help eliminate the problem of
them not recognizing the word I thought was committed to memory out of
context. REWINDING means starting at the end of the story and reading it
backwards.
Hope this helps. .
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