taught my ds's to read using phonics, but having to teach dd sight words is driving me potty.

[pukkapatch]

she loves making lists. will sit down and write out teh entire class list every day. she is 4.5. my boys didnt even recognise the alphabet letters at that age, but she happily sits and writes names, already knows how to spell her siblings and her fiends names without any ehlp.
her handwriting is also on a par with ds2's, and ds1#s is not really much better than hers. he i sten.
but she doesnt seemt ot get the connection between sounds youhear, and letters of the word . so she sight reads words. often guessing them. i think it is soooo wrong. this whole 45 key words business so the kids can parrot them out.
cat sat mat fat. surely it is more important to understand how letter sounds go into making a word?

I think it is best to combine both methods, especially because of the way the english language works.

Oh blimey. DD1 starts school in January and I thought the schools were all doing phonics now??!! Makes much more sense.

Why do you have to use these 45 key words? Sounds from your post as if there's some sort of external force making you teach her to sight read... or do you mean she just does sight read and you've heard of some 45 word thing and are trying to follow what she's doing naturally?

I am not a linguist but I would guess if a child picks up sight reading all on her own, then she is probably making the connection between sounds. Has she worked out for herself that you can turn 'cat' into 'mat' by switching the 'm'? Then she knows what c, a, t and m sound like...

Whilst phonics is very good, I don't think you should dismiss sight reading as well. Different children learn in different ways. Phonics doesn't click with every child, but sight reading or look and learn works better for them. You have to let them use both techniques IMO.

DD does both and is making great progress. I think she does more sight reading (look and/or be told the word once, and then remembers it) than she does sound out, esp when it comes to blends. She knows the blends but in her eyes it seems a slower way of doing things. I encourage her to use both techniques as they suit her. It doesn't appear tp be holding her back at the moment/

Oh dear, I have a lot to learn

Our school are doing Read Write Inc. This means that they are learning the individual sounds and will have learnt all 42 by Christmas. This means that dd has already started sounding out many words, but there are other words, known as 'red' words which cannot be sounded out, e.g. the, what, he, she, my. The suggested method is to 'give' the child these words, so they will learn these as sight words. Children learn to read from a variety of different methods and often a mixture of these methods. It doesn't stop at reading either. Different children learn from different methods. For example, in secondary schools, some children will learn best from visual aids, others will thrive from listening to the teachers. There are other methods, but I'm not a teacher so I can't remember what they are.

thank you all for your replies. sorry i had to go off and write an email and dc still not asleep!
dd wants to read. she is frustrated by the fact that she only gets books with pictures in them. there is a list of 45 key words stapled into the front of her reading record book. we have been asked to 'go over ' these wrods with the children.
she does not understand the cat mat sat thing edam. i don tknow if i should sit down and try to teach it to her. she is soo very eager to learn, unlike her brothers who you have to practically strap down to a chair and headlock them to get their eyes focused on ab ook
not sure what to do. i personally really really dislike the idea of sight recognition. whilst i do realise it has its place.

I think the sight words are very important as well as the phonics - ds1's teacher from last year is much more in favour of the sight word approach, because as adults that is how we read - we don't phonically decode things as we go along. But phonics is great for spelling.

English is so irregular, you need to learn sight words as well!

Also, it can take a while for blending the sounds to click with them. Dd has found that a lot easier than ds1 who took till half way through Reception to blend. But he was reading very fluently by that stage using sight words.

half way through reception?
ds's didnt get to readin g till the end of year one! and even then it was only very limited vocab, blended words. ds1 didnt know the alphabet at teh end of reception. and ds2 knew the alphabet, but that was it! to get my dd reading by halfway through recpetion, which means february, i would have to sit down adn hot house her surely?
i dont want to houthouse her. i dont really want to even be sitting down and going over the bloomin 45 words with her. but she wants to read. and is frustrated by not being able to read the words when she can write them so beautifully.
am i going round in circles? i did say it was drivingme potty. what shouldi do?

You don't need to hothouse her! Dd is in reception, she is finding reading very easy, but I know some struggle - what they do with them is to have a 'guided' reading book that they work on in class, a 'word box' with a selection of the key words - maybe 5 to learn each week. They get an independent reading book later on, and do lots of phonics in class.

Ds1 has a very good 'sight' memory which is why he found the key words easier to manage than the phonics.

but ts,my dd is also in reception. the only books she gets are the ones without pictures.
from what i have gleaned, they arent doing any phonics. well, that she is telling me about anyways.

Can't you break the 45 sight words down into groups of 3-4 and then write very easy sentences with those words or something? Write an easy sentence with a blank and she chooses the one word that makes sense and writes it in. That kind of thing or look for a workbook along those lines maybe, lots of pictures and nothing heavy.

She cannot obviously memorise how to say a huge block of words but a few at a time if she is so keen should work fine

SSSandy - that is what we do - make funny sentences like "I am a Cat". "I am in a cat". etc.

pukka - have you had a parents' evening yet? I'd be very surprised if they weren't doing phonics - have you asked her about how they are learning the letters? THey may well be using phonics on the letters with a view to learning how to blend later, but at the same time doing some sight words.

Has the teacher given you guidance about how she wants you to use the reading book at home? If not, I would go and see her and ask.

When you sau you get the books without pictures, do you mean the ones with pictures? (Sorry, just in an earlier post you said she was frustrated getting books with only pictures in). I think the theory behind having wordless books is that they start to look at the pictures and tell the story, so that when they start reading they use the picture to help them with unfamiliar words. For example, dd's book this week is 'I am a Robot'. It has words like 'I am a robot'. 'I can clean'. 'I can cook'. 'I can float'. etc so the focus is on 'I am' and 'I can', but the third word needs to be worked out. At this stage in reception they're probably not going to know that third word, but they can work it out by the general 'look' of the word (first letter, last letter, what's in the middle) with the help of the picture.

The huge problem is with the way most schools interpret these 45 words. They are meant as a list of words that a child should be able to read by the end of their reception year. now most of these will be decodable once they have learnt all thephonics rules with just a few "tricky" words that even the phonics schemes say need to be learnt by sight, like "the" for example.

It is the pressure to meet targets that mean schools sent out these lists of words way too early to learn by sight rather than using them as an assesment tool at set intervals.

My dd is very good at picking up sight words but even so, I ignored them totally and just continued to teach phonics rules atv home. As a result she knew all the 45 words by half way through reception and is way ahead at reading.

thanks for all your replies.
she has done the phonics previously, but still cant hear the letters in the beginning and end of words. but she can sight read 20 of the 45 words. i like the idea of sentences. i am sure she will enjoy doign that.
trouble is, when do i fid time to do all this work withthem? i have a ds in year 2 who needs lots of help with his reading, though he has recently been whizzing through thte stages, but only because i have done lots of redaing work with him at home. he is very far behind on his numeracy work and we need to work on that.
i also have a ds in year six, with testts galore at the moment.
if i then sit down for 20 minuts with her as well, when do i find the time to feed them? etc? not to mention ballet and football, and beavers? poor ds1 hasnt been to a scout meeting in weeks becuase of upcoming tests.

i think part of the problem is that the ds#s were taught to read by the senco, who was absolutely fantastic. ltos of one on one interaction. very directed. very patient lady. she broke everything down so they could decode it all. whilst dd seemsto be learngin it all on her own.

Count yourself lucky - we have been given 100 words!

Have just hidden them ... and will forget all about them for now . He will learn the sight words through reading - I do lots extra with reading with him at home - I think that it is much better to learn them in the context of reading through repetition than on their own. He finds flash cards very frustrating - don't want to turn him off.

Pukkapatch? Are you saying that your ds hasn't been to schouts because he's revising for SATS? If you pare - please don't! Scouts is far more important than SATS and anyway the schools to tons of preparation next tesm, so you really don't need to do anything at home.

As for the reception reading. I suggest you just do her book with her every night for 10 minutes or so (no more at that age) and maybe, if you like, make some flash cards with the HF words on them and play with them occasionally. Or get her siblings to play with them with her.

She's only very little - most children don't completly crack reading until year 1 or even 2.

Oh dear! Sight words have no part to play in any high quality synthetic phonic programme, which all schools should be using now.

The writers of the DCSF's own programme 'Letters and Sounds' deliberately avoided calling them 'sight words' in an attempt to guard against their being taught at global wholes as has been so common in the past.