Why this sight word site exists!
I created this website because I searched Google for information about sight words, and what I found was deeply misleading.
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The AI summaries, the top-ranking websites, and the scrolling advice all repeated the same claim: that sight words are high-frequency words that must be memorised by sight so children can recognise them instantly.
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I kept scrolling, and the misinformation was everywhere.
​No wonder parents are confused. No wonder teachers are confused.
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If this is the explanation being given by Google AI, it explains why so many children are struggling to read and spell despite years of instruction. Let's change that, together.
Certain words were called “sight words” for decades because they were treated as high-frequency words that had to be memorised by sight, in bulk, usually through flashcards, in order for children to read and write.
The assumption was that once enough words had been memorised, children would be able to figure out other words in text, often through prediction, context, or guesswork.
What people did not realise at the time was that children who appeared to benefit from memorising words were not succeeding because of memorisation. They were succeeding because they already had good phonemic awareness and were quietly using it to teach themselves how speech, sounds, spelling, and meaning connect.
Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual phonemes, the speech sounds in spoken words. It forms the foundation for reading and spelling because it enables children to connect letters and sounds through phonics. Some children are born with strong phonemic awareness, and we can identify who they are from around six months of age.
I train parents and teachers to recognise which children do not have this ability, because these children are the most at risk of struggling to learn to read and spell. Without early protection, they are vulnerable to what is often described as the dyslexia paradox. Phonemic awareness abilities in kindergarten are the single strongest predictor of successful reading acquisition.
In effect, children who learned easily were doing the very thing that phonics programmes now attempt to formalise, but without anyone recognising the mechanism that made it possible. As is often the case, what the brain was doing was not understood, and adults focused on outcomes instead. If a child memorised hundreds of words and learned to read easily, the method was assumed to work. When children did not learn to read, confusion followed.
At the time, the dominant belief was simple: the more high-frequency words a child memorised, the better their reading and writing would become.
Even when phonics later became more widely used, as science showed that connecting letters and sounds is how children learn to read easily, this belief did not disappear.
Phonics programmes were designed as an attempt to facilitate what some children do naturally without instruction. Adults are told to teach a limited number of grapheme–phoneme correspondences to kick-start this process. This leaves many correspondences found in high-frequency words unaddressed.
As a result, sight words continue to sit outside phonics instruction, as if they are separate, and are still widely taught as whole words to be memorised. This happens even in England, where phonics is mandated.
Children who teach themselves to connect letters and sounds have no such limitations. They apply phonics to all words. How they do this without instruction is something most teachers are never taught to understand.
I do not believe we will ensure that every child learns to read between birth and seven, the optimum period for brain development and a critical window given the opaque nature of English orthography, unless adults understand what these children are doing and can recognise early when a child does not have these skills. When this is missed, it becomes extremely difficult for at least one in four children to ever read with ease.
Globally, regardless of the curriculum in use, sight words are still widely described as commonly used words that must be learned separately from phonics because they “cannot be sounded out”. This reinforces the belief that they must be memorised by sight.
If you see any programme selling products that do not show children the speech sounds (phonemes), the spelling (graphemes), and the meaning of words, they are ignoring the science and making orthographic mapping harder to achieve.
On this site, I will show you what children who learn without instruction can actually see.
I will show you the sight word code.
Sight Words: The “Learned by Sight” Myth
Recognising words by sight is the goal. Memorising them by sight is the mistake.
Sight words are high-frequency words that children need in order to read fluently.
What matters is recognising these high-frequency words by sight during real reading, quickly and accurately, without conscious effort.
The problem is not sight recognition.
The problem is the widespread belief that sight recognition is achieved by memorising words visually, as whole shapes, through repetition and exposure. This belief dominates literacy websites and is now being amplified by Google AI summaries.
That belief is wrong.
Below are direct examples of what is currently being said online about sight words.
Examples of sight word misinformation online
Wikipedia
“High frequency sight words are commonly used words that young children are encouraged to memorize as a whole by sight, so that they can automatically recognize these words in print without having to use any strategies to decode.”
This statement confuses the goal with the mechanism.
Children do not recognise words automatically because they memorised them as visual wholes. They recognise words automatically because the words are already stored in memory following successful decoding and mapping.
Decoding is not bypassed. It has been completed and internalised.
Twinkl
“Sight-read means being able to read a word without the need for ‘decoding’ or ‘segmenting’ and ‘blending’, you are able to memorise the word by sight, rather than by ‘sounding out’ the word.”
“However, not all words can be read using this method, these words are known as common exception words.”
Sight reading is not a strategy that replaces decoding. It is the result of decoding having already been successful.
The claim that some words cannot be read using decoding reflects limits in instruction, not limits in the words themselves.
Words are labelled “exceptions” because the instructional model does not support full speech-print mapping across English.
Understood.org
“Sight words are common words that kids recognize instantly without sounding them out.”
“Many sight words are tricky to read and spell — they aren’t spelled the way they sound.”
Children do not stop sounding out words because sounding out is no longer useful. They stop because the word has already been decoded and stored.
The claim that words are “not spelled the way they sound” usually reflects limited phoneme knowledge and restricted correspondence teaching, not a flaw in English spelling.
English spelling represents speech at the phoneme level.
Reading Eggs
“They are high-frequency words that may not be able to be pictured and, as such, they simply must be memorised and understood.”
Words do not become readable because they are “pictured” in the mind.
Skilled readers do not store words as images or visual snapshots. Words are stored through connections between spelling, pronunciation, and meaning.
SightWords.com
“Sight words are words that should be memorized to help a child learn to read and write.”
This reverses cause and effect.
Children do not memorise words in order to read. They read accurately in order to form word memory.
What is backed by science
Orthographic mapping theory explains how children learn to recognise words by sight.
Creating a sight word involves forming permanent connections between a word’s letters, its pronunciation, and its meaning in memory (Perfetti, 1992; Rack, Hulme, Snowling, & Wightman, 1994).
To read a word, a connection between a word’s spelling and its letter-sounds is key (Ehri, 1992, 1998).
A reader must:
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notice the sequence of letters
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pronounce the word accurately
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map the spoken sounds to the letters
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read and write the word successfully a small number of times
This process of orthographic mapping (Ehri, 2014; Kilpatrick, 2015) forms the “glue” that bonds words in long-term memory.
Once this bond is formed, the word can be recognised by sight.
Sight recognition is the outcome of orthographic mapping, not an alternative to it.
Why children stop sounding out sight words
Children do not stop decoding because decoding is no longer useful.
They stop because decoding has already been successful.
The spelling, pronunciation, and meaning are already securely linked in memory. The decoding process has become internalised, which is why the word can now be recognised instantly by sight.
Sight reading does not bypass decoding. It is what decoding produces when learning has been successful.
Why some children appear to learn sight words easily
The memorisation myth persists because some children do appear to learn sight words quickly, even when they are presented as whole words to memorise.
This does not mean memorisation is the mechanism.
It means those children already have good phonemic awareness and a functioning alphabetic mapping system.
Children with secure phonemic awareness will often analyse the spelling automatically, map it to speech, and store the word through orthographic mapping, even if adults are telling them to “just remember it”.
For these children, one or two accurate exposures can be enough when spelling, pronunciation, and meaning are clear.
They recognise words by sight because they are mapping them, not because they are memorising words visually by shapes.
Why this approach fails many children
For children without secure phonemic awareness, being given whole words to memorise does not help them learn to recognise words by sight.
It removes access to the mechanism required to build orthographic representations.
Instead of forming stable word memory, these children are pushed towards:
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visual memorisation
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partial letter cues
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guessing from context
These strategies may allow short-term recognition, but they do not scale and they do not support spelling.
This is why teaching sight words as items to be memorised disproportionately harms dyslexic learners, neurodivergent children, and children with speech and language differences.
The problem is not that these children need more repetition.
The problem is that they are being asked to memorise instead of being supported to map.
Why memorisation keeps being recommended
Advice to memorise sight words persists because of limitations in instruction, not limitations in children.
When teaching covers only a restricted set of grapheme–phoneme correspondences, many high-frequency words fall outside what has been explicitly taught.
Instead of extending instruction or making speech-print mapping clearer, the words are labelled “tricky”, “irregular”, or “exceptions”, and memorisation is presented as unavoidable.
Children are fully capable of mapping hundreds of words in their first year of school when they have secure phonemic awareness and access to accurate speech–print information.
What sight words actually are
Sight words are not words learned by sight.
Sight words are words that can be recognised by sight because they have been successfully orthographically mapped.
All words can become sight words once spelling, pronunciation, and meaning are securely linked.
Recognising words by sight is the goal.
Memorising words by sight is the mistake.
Why this Mapped Words® site exists
This site exists because Google AI and major literacy websites repeatedly describe sight words as items that must be memorised visually in order to be recognised by sight.
That explanation sounds plausible. It is also wrong.
Orthographic mapping theory explains how sight recognition actually develops, why some children cope despite memorisation-based teaching, and why many others fail.
Sight recognition matters.
High-frequency words matter.
Teaching children to memorise words by sight is not how sight recognition develops.
What happens when high frequency words are mapped instead of memorised
In Reception classrooms using Mapped Words® to facilitate Word Mapping Mastery®, four- and five-year-old children routinely:
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recognise over 400 high-frequency words from the Speedie Sight Words book
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recognise these words instantly by sight
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spell those same words accurately
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achieve this before they start Year 1
These children are not exceptional.
They are not memorising words by sight.
They are being shown how speech, spelling, and meaning connect, so the words are stored properly in memory and can be recognised by sight and spelled correctly. They are using a multi-sensory spelling routine to bond speech, spelling and meaning in the brain's word bank.
Every brain that can understand spoken language can do this. The ideal scenario is that they are doing this from birth. Please ask every pregnant woman to undertake the training I offer at https://www.speediewordmapping.com/parent-tutor-course
This is what orthographic mapping looks like when it is supported rather than blocked.
And this is why it is crucial that no dyslexic learner is ever taught high-frequency words as whole words.
I initially Code Mapped® the seven Duck Level words for our Prep and Reception children, using the Speech Sound Pics Approach, to show which letters are graphemes in the 400 plus high-frequency words. The videos also enabled children to hear the corresponding sounds.
A couple of years later, I created Phonemies, to show the sound, phoneme, value as well. We called these Speech Sound Monsters®. At that point, we were Code Mapping® when showing the spelling, graphemes, and Monster Mapping® when also showing the sound value.
Miss Emma
Emma Hartnell-Baker MEd SEN
Creator of Word Mapping Mastery®