How does teaching sight words lead to reading problems in children? I've taught children of all ages to read, and a special group of kids are particularly dear to me - the 6 to 9 year old struggling readers. These are amazing kids that are perfectly bright and intelligent. But they cannot read... ...because they are taught to "read" with sight words, and... ...because without explicit phonics instructions and with out developing phonemic awareness, so many words all start to look the same to the