How to deal With sight words in Reception

[Gingham1]

This week we have received a list of sight words to learn to read and write! This is following quite a few reading books (very old, mix of publishers) that do not follow reading ability or phonic phases taught in class, books contain words with ou/Oo/ch/ing/wh/ght etc.

My question is how to approach this with the teacher. I really didn't want to go down the "sight words" route so early in his reading journey. Also would prefer decodable reading books but I was willing to ignore this for the time being and obtain our own, that was before we received the sight words. Why do schools still do this?

I bought my own decodable books and read them instead (Julia Donaldson Songbirds books).

We read through the few sight words she had a few times, then we tried to spot them in any books we read.

We bought our own books too last year and also used oxford owl.

Thank you. I have a few books and will get some more. It's a shame they can't provide the right books at this stage.

So I shouldn't question the sight words?

You can question anything you're unhappy about.

I think it's normal to learn a small number of sight words that don't follow the phonics rules to enable kids to read stories, things like the, he, she, said, you, your etc. We have ten to learn.

It isn't normal, because they do 'follow rules' - when you teach children the alphabetic code. And we do!

It must seem normal to anyone who regularly reads the primary boards, but it really isn't.