Imagine a first-grade teacher finishing a week of high-frequency word instruction. Her students had practiced the week's ten words every day, chanting them at morning meeting, tracing them on whiteboards, sorting them into a pocket chart, and nearly every child passed Friday's quiz. Then, on Monday, as she worked in a small group of students, she noticed a student who stopped at the word "said". He looked at the page, tried "sad" and "sat," and then just skipped it altogether. He got the word right last week on his quiz! The teacher's first instinct is reasonable on the outside: "he just needs more repetition and more time memorizing this word!" But the trouble she is missing is that he hasn't actually practiced decoding the word to help move the word into storage. Pure memorization alone, this teacher quickly realizes, is not the way to ensure students master sight words. This article discusses how high-frequency words become sight words, and why explicit attention to letter-sound structure is what really helps students master sight words. You'll leave this article with an understanding that sight word practice can be a necessary component of reading practice, but as a supplement to, and not a substitute for, the strong reading instruction you are doing in your classroom.