Help with reading with Sight words

[Guest guest]

Hi,

I am trying to teach sight words(I am only doing lower case letters) to my

daughter. She get very confused when I make her read two words that start with

the same letter. I am making her spell out the words and making her discriminate

with both the words in teh field. She is learning, but the minute I change them

to upper case she doesn't know what the word is. How do I go about fixing that?

I am not really sure what she is looking at when she is identifying a word,

sometimes it seems like it's the starting letter, sometimes it seems like the

two letters that are together(Ex: after learning zebra, when i wrote pizza, she

read that as zebra. Also, after yellow, she read ball as yellow). I am so

confused as to how to teach her reading.

I tried the phonetic way, but she just didn't get it as to how to blend sounds,

she knows all the lteeter sounds but blending the sounds is hard.

Am I doing it correct with the sight words? My approach is more like how I would

do teaching labelling of objects. Is this correct for sight words? Making her

spell the words and learn the spelling by rote is the way to go?

I am desperate for any and all suggesstions and comments and tips.

Thanks a lot!