Charlotte Mason Reading Lessons Part 5: Sight Words

Charlotte Mason reading lessons take into account the most important parts of learning to read. We begin with teaching the child the letter sounds, then encourage him in building words with his letters. 

But we also realize that the English language does not always follow the same rules of phonics. In fact, it contains a lot of words that we need to know by sight. 

Let’s take a look at what Miss Mason has to say: 

If words were always made on a given pattern in English, if the same letter always represented the same sounds, learning to read would be an easy matter; for the child would soon acquire the few elements of which all words would, in that case, be composed. But many of our English words are, each, a law unto itself: there is nothing for it, but the child must learn to know them at sight; he must recognise ‘which,’ precisely as he recognises ‘B,’ because he has seen it before, been made to look at it with interest, so that the pattern of the word is stamped upon his retentive brain. This process should go on side by side with the other––the learning of the powers of the letters; for the more variety you can throw into his reading lessons, the more will the child enjoy them. Lessons in word-making help him to take intelligent interest in words; but his progress in the art of reading depends chiefly on the ‘reading at sight’ lessons.

(Vol 1 Page 203-204)

Materials Needed for a Sight-Reading Lesson

“I wish some publisher would provide us with what we want––nursery rhymes, in good bold type, with boxes of loose words to match, a separate box, or division, for each page, so that the child may not be confused by having too many words to hunt amongst. The point is that he should see, and look at, the new word many times, so that its shape becomes impressed upon his brain.”

In a Charlotte Mason reading lesson on sight words, she recommends cutting and pasting several copies of the same nursery rhyme into a sheet of paper. 

Admittedly, it may take a bit of effort to print and cut the words to nursery rhymes—although in reality, it’s so much easier to do in our day and age than it probably was in Miss Mason’s time! After all, we can easily print several pages of a given nursery rhyme and then just cut them out. 

In order to make things even easier for you, we have compiled this FREE Letter and Word Cards Printable for you, which contains the nursery rhyme “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” that you can print off in several pieces of cardstock and cut into several sets. 

Steps for Charlotte Mason Sight Reading Lessons 

Here are some steps for doing sight-reading lessons for your child. 

1. Interest the child in the thing, then show the word for it. 

This is how the child learns. First, he gets the notion of the table; he sees several tables; he finds they have legs, by which you can scramble up; very often covers which you may “which you may pull off; and on them many things lie, good and pleasant for a baby to enjoy; sometimes, too, you can pull these things off the table, and they go down with a bang, which is nice. The grown-up people call this pleasant thing, full of many interests, ‘table,’ and, by-and-by, baby says ‘table’ too; and the word ‘table’ comes to mean, in a vague way, all this to him. ‘Around table,’ ‘on the table,’ and so on, form part of the idea of ‘table’ to him. In the same way baby chimes in when his mother sings. She says, ‘Baby, sing,’ and, by-and-by, notions of ‘sing,’ ‘kiss,’ ‘love,’ dawn on his brain.”

“That’s just it. Interest the child in the thing, and he soon learns the sound-sign for it––that is, its name. Now, I maintain that, when he is a little older, he should learn the form-sign––that is, the printed word––on the same principle. It is far “easier for a child to read plum-pudding than to read ‘to, to,’ because ‘plum-pudding’ conveys a far more interesting idea.”  

(Vol 1 Page 204)

2. Cut up words from reading material familiar to your child (e.g. a nursery rhyme). 

“First, I bought a dozen penny copies of the ‘History of Cock Robin’––good bold type, bad pictures, that we cut out.Then we had a nursery pasting day––pasting the sheets on common drawing-paper, six one side down, and six the other; so that now we had six complete copies, and not twelve. Then we cut up the first page only, of all six copies, line by line, and word by word. We gathered up the words and put them in a box, and our preparations were complete.Now for the lesson. Bobbie and I are shut in by ourselves in the morning room. I always use a black-board in teaching the children. I write up, in good clear ‘print’ hand,          

Cock Robin

(Vol 1 Page 212) 

Charlotte Mason describes the first sight reading lesson as using a nursery rhyme that the child is familiar with. In this example, the mother cuts up several copies of “Who Killed Cock Robin?” into individual words. She puts these words in a box.

3. Ask the child to find the words you write on the board (from the material in Step #2). 

Bobbie watches with more interest because he knows his letters. I say, pointing to the word, ‘cock robin,’ which he repeats.”Then the words in the box are scattered on the table, and he finds half a dozen ‘cock robins’ with great ease.

(Vol 1 Page 212) 

The lesson officially starts with the mother writing a word on the board and then asking the child to find that word. (In this case, she wrote down two words, the name “Cock Robin.”) 

4. Do the same exercise for other words in the same material. 

We do the same thing with ‘sparrow,’ ‘arrow,’ ‘said,’ ‘killed,’ ‘who,’ and so on, till all the words in the verse have been learned. The words on the black-board grow into into a column, which Bob reads backwards and forwards, and every way, except as the words run in the verse.

(Vol 1 Page 212)

After he finds the first word you wrote on the board, write the other words in random order. Then have your child find those words in your box and practice reading the words on the board. 

5. Have your child arrange the loose words. 

Then Bobbie arranges the loose words into columns like that on the board. Then into columns of his own devising, which he reads off. Lastly, culminating joy (the whole lesson has been a delight!), he finds among the loose words, at my dictation,     

‘Who killed Cock Robin
I said the sparrow
With my bow and arrow    
I killed Cock Robin”

“Arranging the words in verse form. Then I had still one unmutilated copy, out of which Bob had the pleasure of reading the verse, and he read it forwards and backwards. So long as he lives he will know those twelve words.”

(Vol 1 Pages 212-213) 

Once your child has been able to find and read the different words, ask him to arrange them, first according to the column you wrote on the board, then in any other way he likes. 

The last part of the lesson is this: you would dictate the nursery rhyme and he would arrange the letters according to your dictation. Then he could experience the joy of being able to read the full rhyme on his word cards, and on the page of the book. 

6. Incorporate early spelling lessons. 

As spelling is simply the art of seeing, seeing the letters in a word as we see the features of a face––say to the child, ‘Can you spell sky?’––or any of the shorter words. He is put on his mettle, and if he fails this time, be sure he will be able to spell the word when you ask him next; but do not let him learn to spell or even say the letters aloud with the word before him.

(Vol 1 Page 205) 

As explained in our previous post, Charlotte Mason Reading Lessons Part 4: Word-Building, we train our children to pay attention to the letters that form the words and ask them to spell them.

Can A Child Sight Read Before Learning Letters? 

The interesting thing we noticed in Charlotte Mason’s sight reading lessons is that she does not consider it a prerequisite for the child to know his letters; she believes that children can recognize words by sight even before they know their letter sounds: 

“You don’t mean to say you would go plump into words of three or four syllables before a child knows his letters?”

“It is possible to read words without knowing the alphabet, as you know a face without singling out its features; but we learn not only the names but the sounds of the letters before we begin to read words.”

(Vol 1 Page 204) 

How is this possible? This is because a word is essentially a symbol for an object, and a child can recognize it as a symbol even without being able to recognize the individual letters. Perhaps you have noticed your toddler or preschooler recognizing brand logos even without being able to read the individual letters? 

“But the reading! I can’t get over three syllables in the first lesson. Why, it’s like teaching a twelve-months old child to waltz.”

“You say that because we forget that a group of letters is no more than the sign of a word, while a word is only the vocal sign of a thing or an act.

(Vol 1 Page 204)

Phonics and Sight Words Are Both Needed 

Sight words are a crucial part of learning to read in English. However, we also cannot discount the necessity for learning phonics, or the sounds that letters and letter-combinations make. Miss Mason takes this into account as well: 

…”I cannot be satisfied that a child should learn to read without knowing the powers of the letters. You constantly see a child spell a word over to himself, and then pronounce it; the more so, if he has been carefully taught the sounds of the letters––not merely their names.”

“Naturally; for though many of our English words are each a law unto itself, others offer a key to a whole group, as arrow gives us sp arrow, m arrow, h arrow; but we have alternate days––one for reading, the other for word-building––and that is one way to secure variety, and, so, the joyous interest which is the real secret of success.”

(Vol 1 Pages 213-214) 

From this, we can see that our reading lessons in a CM homeschool cannot just be about one area; instead, she recommends alternating days for learning sight words and word building. 

Sight Reading Lessons in a Charlotte Mason Homeschool 

Teaching sight reading is an important component of Charlotte Mason reading lessons. But bear in mind it’s not only sight reading that we teach; we also teach phonics and word building, and in fact recommend alternating these two throughout the week of lessons. 

Check out our other posts in this series to have a bigger picture of reading lessons in the Charlotte Mason method: 

• Charlotte Mason Reading Lessons Part 1: An Overview
• Charlotte Mason Reading Lessons Part 2: Readiness
• Charlotte Mason Reading Lessons Part 3: Recognizing Letters
• Charlotte Mason Reading Lessons Part 4: Word-Building and Spelling