I have a second grade student who has been learning very slowly. He can “sound out” words fairly well. But thirty seconds later if he sees the same
word he often has to sound it out again. This has been going on for months
with the same words. This is especially true of sight words. I have tried to have him sound the parts of these words that are regular and then point out the irregular part. To aid memory I was thinking about using Seeing Stars to help him to visualize the words. But now that I have read the manual I see
that they use letter names rather than letter sounds to visualize words.
Will this be confusing to my student?
Re: Seeing Stars
My son recently did 68 hours of seeing stars , and it definitely got him over the hump you have described with your student. He was decoding simple words slowly before, now he is decoding everything, and his fluency is better. He’d been tutored using many different methods and it didn’t seem to confuse him at all.
Sight words often do not “play fair” and they are hard to remember because the sound is not what the child usually expects. So, while you like him to sound out many words, these Seeing Stars words are best pictured by letters. Our students only work on five to ten words at a time, practicing visualizing, air writning, spelling until they are correct five times in a row. Then those correct words are retired (you still need to review) and new words are added.