The SIPPS program uses a spell-out strategy for introducing high-frequency sight words. This strategy allows students who have not mastered spelling-sound relationships to make connections between the graphemes in a word and the word itself. The spell-out strategy draws students’ attention to each individual letter that comprises the word being taught. As they acquire more phoneme-grapheme connections, students will be able to connect the correspondences they know to high-frequency sight words (as well as to unknown decodable words). High-frequency sight words can be either permanently or temporarily irregular. A high-frequency sight word is permanently irregular if one or more graphemes does not conform to its regular phoneme sound. A high-frequency sight word can also be temporarily irregular because the specific sound-spellings in the word have not yet been acquired.
As the students learn letter-sound correspondences, you can support orthographic mapping by identifying the regular and irregular grapheme-phoneme correspondences in words and having the students say the sounds for the spellings. This sound-out support is built into SIPPS Fifth Edition.