Ava's Use Of Sight Words In Who Lives Near Lakes

487 Words2 Pages

Ava’s oral reading performance of the story, Who Lives Near Lakes?, shows that this book is at her frustrational level. Ava displays both strengths and weaknesses during her oral reading performance. Ava’s strength lies in her use of phonics. However, she shows a weakness in her identification of sight words.
Ava shows strength in her use of phonics skills, specifically when decoding words containing diphthongs, r-controlled vowels, vowel digraphs, and words with silent final e. This is evident when Ava decodes the word near, which contains the vowel digraph “ea,” the word out, which contains the diphthong “ou,” and the r-controlled vowel “u” in the word turtles. Ava is also able to decode words ending in silent e as in the words like and lake. …show more content…

Sight words, also referred to as high frequency words, are words that children must learn to memorize. Irregular high frequency words are words that cannot be decoded using the rules of phonics. Ava is able to decode many high frequency irregular words without hesitation. This is evident when Ava is able to decode the following words: many, on, they, to, the, there, are, you, people, and mother. Decoding these words, without hesitation, can help build Ava’s level of fluency, since this enables her to spend less time on decoding these words, and more time on comprehending and making meaning of the story. However, Ava is unsuccessful when decoding some irregular high frequency words, such as: live, walk, and when. She reads the word live as līve, without correcting herself twice in the story. This is evident when she reads aloud: “Many animals līve near lakes,” and “People līve near lakes too.” When reading this sight word using the “long i” vowel, Ava fails to realize that using this word does not fit in context and does not make sense. Also, Ava reads the sentence “The babies walk behind the mother duck,” as “The babies wake behind the mother.” Ava is unable to successfully read the word walk, and substitutes it with a word that contains a similar appearance in spelling, but her substitution does not make sense in