Sight Words

I hate sight words. Do you have young children? Have you been homeschooling during quarantine? Are you tired of flipping note cards and trying to keep track of what they know and don’t know? Well me too! So I wrote a python/JavaScript app to let me do sight words on my phone and keep track of what my daughter knows and doesn’t know.

It all started in preschool. Seemed simple enough. Learn these words. Of course we don’t teach phonics anymore. We just show them a word and make them memorize the shapes associating it with a word. Rote memorization. That’s how we measure children now. Not can you figure out the word from the letters and sounds. Instead just memorize these shapes and patterns. Now I’m not an educator but I don’t think this is the best way to do things.

I’m getting off subject…. I whipped up a quick app with a python flask backend and a SQLite DB. The app with flask based with some very simple routes. One to serve up the main page, one to serve words, and one to record results. The main page loads a simple html page with some simple JavaScript to pull words and update a div with the new word. There are places to click on the screen for correct and incorrect words as well as a start and stop function.

The correct and incorrect choices use an xmlhttprequest to post the results to the flask app for recording in the database. This lets me keep track of what she knows. After that they call another function to get and display a new word. This is handled by a route that selects the top 5 words that she has demonstrated she knows and the top five she doesn’t. Then it pulls a random word from this shorted list to display. Once she has done enough to move on the end button displays how many were right vs wrong. The start button resets the score and pulls a new word. There is also text to speech to say the word in case she is doing it by herself while I’m on a phone call.