#Research on teaching sight words full

Developmentally, it is much easier for very young learners to pattern-out (i.e. Secret Stories® feeds the brain’s natural inclination to seek patterns when learning to read by aligning patterns of letter behavior to patterns of kid behavior.

#Research on teaching sight words full

Simply put, patterning is the brain’s way of doing things… and Secret Stories® takes full advantage of this. The brain is often referred to as the ultimate pattern-making machine, seeking and storing memories based on patterns, or repeated relationships between ideas. “Quite apart from anything the teacher does… the student, being human, is a pattern finder, and a pattern maker…” - Dr. Rote memorization is not only developmentally inappropriate for early grade learners, but requires a vast amount of instructional time, energy and resources (assistant and volunteer time, activities, material, etc.) It is also far from ideal from a brain based learning perspective.

This study, however, may seem of little value to those teaching without the Secrets in early grade classrooms, where overreliance on sight words is far too frequent, due to early learners’ gross lack of skills in comparison to the required text level assessments. To compensate, beginning readers must memorize hundreds of sight words before the end of second grade, often forcing teachers to prioritize teaching the “reading” over teaching the reader.īeginning grade learners own so little of the alphabetic code that it’s virtually impossible for them to make sense of the many different sounds that letters make when they come together in words. To compensate, teachers will often rely on the rote memorization of sight words to help students “read.”

Knowing the Secrets empowers kids to decode approximately 95% of the most commonly memorized sight words by applying what they know about letter behavior to predict their most likely sounds.