We’ve learned a lot about how the brain works when learning to read. We now know that almost all words eventually become “sight words” or words that we can read and spell with automaticity. The process by which that happens - orthographic mapping is a connection between sound and letters or letter groups. High frequency words aren’t any different. We bolded that because a few years ago, that was big new learning for us. To learn a word a student needs to connect the letters and sounds, even if the word has irregular parts.
We used to think that high frequency words with irregular parts like said, his, could, is, was, and the, needed to be memorized visually. So we did a lot of things to help kids remember how words looked, making the shape of the letters with our bodies, cheering the letters, and drawing boxes around the words.
Now we know that words with irregular parts are learned by supporting connections to the parts that are regular (for example, the s and d in said) and supporting connections to the parts that are irregular—noting that the ai in the word said represents the short e sound. Looking at the shape of the word or chanting the letters doesn’t help kids learn it, connecting the letters and sounds does.
We love these Heart Word Magic videos by Really Great Reading. The language they use when talking about the different parts of the words is clear and useful. They’ve got a ton of videos designed to help kids learn high frequency words with irregular parts.
For more ideas and language around this, check out Word Study Activities that Promote Mapping by David Kilpatrick (Section 5) in Equipped for Reading Success or find a pdf of this section via your online resources for Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties. Also, consider regrouping your high frequency words for instruction. You can group by patterns (could, should, would) or group words that have the same irregular part (has, is, as, was, his). See our previous post about high frequency words for more information about high frequency words in general.
Until next time,
Lizzie and Marie
Awesome information as always!