SnapWords® At School

At the beginning, you will want to find out exactly which words each of your students know on sight. For some children, that might mean 3-5 words. For others it might mean 30-35. The challenge for the teacher is how to organize the class so that every child can progress without being left behind or being held back. Use our tracking sheets to conduct a pretest. You will start each child on the List that contains words they didn’t instantly recognize (no attempts to sound out or guess). Group your students by level so that you can offer personalized instruction during small group time. Once you have created your groups, meet with each group and plan to spend 10 minutes of small group instruction time on introducing SnapWords® on their level. Follow the directions inside the SnapWords® Mini-Lessons book that came in your kit. Once you have told your group what each word says and you have talked about each picture word, pairs of children can work together to practice and review their words. When partners tell you they know all the words in a particular list, you may then use the tracking sheets again to test their knowledge before moving them up to the next list.

It is very important to follow the basic directions that you will find on the back of the cover card. Quite simply, this is the procedure: You will show your students a SnapWords® card, you will immediately tell them what the word says, and then you will study the picture together and they will tell you what they notice in the picture. The reason for telling them immediately what the word says is that visual thinkers learn so quickly and so permanently that if a child guesses the word and guesses it wrong while they are looking at the picture, that wrong guess is what will stay with them. It will take longer to unlearn the first impression than it would to just tell them the correct word from the beginning.

What is very special about the learning gifts of picture-thinkers, or visual learners, is that they have the capacity to snap a mental picture of each word, picture and all, and later, when they see the plain word, they will recall it, picture and all. Putting the word into a picture is like making a special delivery to your student’s visual memory: delivering abstract symbols in a way that they can learn instantly.

When children learn the collection of words that make up the SnapWords® collection, they will be able to read most words they come across. In addition, during the process of learning SnapWords®, if you follow the instructions in SnapWords® Mini-Lessons, your students will be learning hundreds of other words that share spelling characteristics with the SnapWords® they are learning. Finally, one of the strengths of visual learners is that they automatically notice patterns. This means that when they come across a new word, they will recognize parts of the word that remind them of the same spelling pattern in a previously learned word. In addition, The Illustrated Book of Sounds & Their Spelling Patterns will continue the process of learning unknown vocabulary and if you use this book, your child will learn all the sound spellings in our language.

Historically, students who have the benefit of learning sight words using SnapWords far surpass expectations. For example, Kindergarten classes might be expected to learn 50 words, but when Kindergarteners have access to SnapWords, they can easily learn 100-300 words. This is because visual learning is so powerful. The picture takes the word into visual memory without the need for repletion, memorization or drill, and this method of delivery means that children are only limited by how many or how few words they have access to.

If children benefit from access to SnapWords®, our belief is that the more of these picture words they are exposed to the better. If they are able to learn easily and quickly using SnapWords®, better to let them have access to all the words in the Kit than to limit them to the prescribed list. Giving them more now might prevent them from bogging down later. The rule of thumb is to follow the lead of the child. If they learn all the required words and are eager for more, give them more.