By spending just a few minutes a day your child or student can quickly and easily learn the most common English words and get an early start at reading.
When the program first launches, you will be asked for the name of the child. Later, you can add, delete or select other students. The name will appear in reports and each student’s progress will be tracked independently, so that words that give a student trouble will be offered more frequently only to that student.
Once you have selected the student, click the Start button and the first word will appear. The words is displayed relatively large and separated from other user interface so it is clear which word the student needs to read. For a successful “Sight Word” the student should promptly read the word, not sound it out, so if the student takes more than a few seconds, starts sounding it out, or says the wrong word, it should be considered incorrect. It is better to be too harsh than too easy, especially early on as a word marked as correct will not be asked as frequently in the future.
If you make a mistake (eg the student says the word incorrectly, but you accidentally tick it as correct), you can click the resulting check mark to toggle the result. If you prefer, you can use the Z and X keys to mark answers correct or incorrect.
Sight Words divides words in to three categories:
The words displayed to the child are biased towards words that still need work and untested words, but known good words will still appear from time to time and may then become in need of work if the student makes a mistake.
The main screen shows both the overall status of the student (number of known good words) and the number of words tested since this student was selected.
My recommendation is to spend a few minutes each day (or a couple times a day) with the student doing 50 to 100 words. For each word the student gets wrong, say the word clearly to them and have them repeat it, then continue. Since each word must take only a few seconds, 100 words should take less than five minutes.
At the end of a session, create a report so the student can see their progress, and do a quick revision of some or all of the words that still need work.
Given their are almost 2000 words, it will probably take two to four weeks before you have worked through most of the untested words, and then you can watch the words that still need work dwindle. By the end the student will be able to quickly read on sight almost all of the most common English words.
The word list includes both the Dolch Sight Word List, as well as many other common English words. It also includes the month and weekday names, as well as most of the planets, but does not include any other names nor any words whose spelling varies between Australia, Canada, Great Britain and the United States.