Sight words: data collection

My last blog article on TeachHub was about sight word instruction. If you didn't get a chance to read it, check it out here. I then started thinking that I have never really shared how I teach sight words. I decided that the next few blog posts would focus on sight word instruction in hopes that someone might find my ideas useful.

 To begin I assess my kids to find out where to start. If you're a general ed teacher, you are probably thinking, ahhh, that is easy, they can read it or they can't, but as a special ed teacher, it is not always that easy. Most of my students are very limited verbally and are not able to say the sight words presented out loud. This makes assessing a bit more difficult. In the past I have presented to students with a bank of words (usually 4) and had them choose the word I called out. I always wondered how to record this more efficiently as I felt just circling the words they got correct was not the best way of knowing what they know. Recently I discovered a new recording sheet on the blog A Special Kind of Class. This sheet enables me to list the target word, the words presented and the word the student picked. Brilliant! I assess my kids on sight words formally once per month. Then I use that data to determine what words to teach. And that will be for the next post.  You can find the recording sheet on A Special Kind of Class' website.  Just scroll to the bottom and it is the last one.  She has made some updates to it since I originally wrote this post.

Data Collection sheet from A Special Kind of Class

Oh one more thing, I made data collection sheet for the Dolch sight words. If anyone would like them, please leave a comment with your email and I will send them over to you.  You can now find the data sheets by clicking here!