Kindergartners needs to learn to read sound-by-sound. At first, kindergartners learn letter sounds and short vowels. These basic phonics sounds help kids decode cvc words like cat, met, dig and mop. Cvc words are consonant-vowel-consonant words. In addition, 5 year olds need to know basic sight words for kindergarten.
Sight words break the phonetic code in some way. They always have at least one phonetic component though. For example, in the sight word “the” /th/ is regular and the e at the end is irregular. In “would” the /w/ and /d/ are regular, but the /oul/ is irregular.
Kids need to read sight words in 2 steps. First, the child needs to decode the phonetic aspect of the word. An educator can help direct the child to the phonetic components. Next, after trying to read the sight word phonetically, the student needs to make a sound tweak. Learning how to make sound tweaks is an important part of learning to read English. With basic sight words for kindergarten, the educator can help the child practice decoding first and then making a sound tweak (or matching the sounds to a word that is familiar). Thee sounds like the, would sounds like wood… etc.
Reading Elephant offers printable phonics books that gently guide kids through the most common phonics sounds.

Reading Elephant Series 1-5 are printable short vowel books designed for beginning kindergartners. Our printable books are decodable readers, meaning kids can crack the text sound-by-sound. The sight words are strategically introduced gradually to help kids learn the most common words that require sound tweaks. Here are some basic sight words for kindergarten:
the
to
a
are
said
was
from
they
you
have
there
again
your
some
water
who
what
one
would
do
come
could
little
want
Reading Elephant sight word list coming soon.
We get consistent requests for a sight word list that goes along with our printable phonics book series. Since our phonics books are currently only printable, we can update them and make additions to each series. These constant improvements on the product make it a challenge to create a stagnant sight word list. Therefore, I think we’ll come out with a preliminary sight word list soon. Just like with our phonics books, we will likely make constant improvements on our sight word list as well.
In other Reading Elephant news, Series 17, the inflectional ending /ed/ printable books are coming soon!
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