Why do I keep harping on the importance of explicit, systematic phonics instruction? I know it bugs some people.

Teaching decoding and encoding of written words in English shouldn’t be much more than 30 minutes a day for most kids at a K-2 level. So what’s the big deal, right?

Here’s my “why”:

My son just entered kindergarten. We received a folder from his teacher with two sets of materials: an overview of the Fundations phonics program (good!), and a list of sight words that he would be expected to memorize each week (um).

This is how the sight word overview began:

Dear Families,

Did you know about 75% of words we read are sight words?

Sight word are words that do not follow the rules of spelling and therefore must be recognized by sight. The more sight words a student can recognize, the more fluent of a reader they will become.