Sight words for Prep to Year 3

What sight words are

Sight words are the words a child reads in an instant, without stopping to work them out. The lists teachers call sight words, Fry and Dolch among them, are really high-frequency words: the hundred or so words that make up about half of everything a young child reads. The, and, was, said, you, they. A child who knows these well spends their effort on the new words in a sentence instead of the common ones.

Why many Australian schools now teach them as heart words

For a long time sight words were taught as shapes to memorise, often on flashcards drilled before a child knew their letters and sounds. The reading research since then points the other way. Readers remember words by connecting their letters to their sounds, not by their outline, and most high-frequency words are regular once the code is taught. Of the first 100 Fry words, about a third can be sounded out with Foundation phonics and another 40 or so with the spellings taught over the next year or two.

So the tool sorts every word into one of three groups. Decodable words use only spellings most Foundation phonics programs teach in the first terms. Later code words are regular but need a spelling taught later, like the ee in see or the ow in down. Heart words have a part that does not follow the usual spelling for its sound, and that part is marked with a heart. Children decode the rest of the word as normal and learn only the marked letters by heart.

The marks follow Australian English, so the o in from is short, and the a in after, ask and plant is the a of father. Words can sit in different groups in different programs: if your program teaches a spelling earlier or later, trust your scope and sequence over my labels. Some programs, for example, teach a, is, his and has as heart words at first, because the a is a schwa and the s says /z/.

How I would use the cards without drilling

• Decode first. When a word comes up, sound it out together before it goes on the screen at speed. For a heart word, sound out the regular parts and say what the heart part does in this word.
• A few at a time. Three to five new words a week is plenty. Choose a group of 25, then filter to the decodable words your class can already read.
• Short and often. Two minutes on the board at the start of a lesson beats twenty minutes once a week. The timer moves the words on by itself so you can watch who is reading and who is waiting.
• Into real reading. A word is known when a child reads it in a sentence, not just on a card. The checklist has a column for spotting it in a book, and decodable readers are the place to find it.
• Writing, too. The last column on the checklist is for writing the word unaided, which is the surest sign it is stored.

Ready-made groups

• Prep and Foundation
• Year 1
• Year 2
• Year 3
• First 100
• Heart words in the first 100
• Dolch pre-primer

Read more

The sight words list guide compares the lists Australian schools use, and Fry’s first 100 sight words has a free starter pack. For the phonics behind the decodable words, see the science of reading. To practise writing the words in your state’s font, put them into the handwriting worksheet generator.

Frequently asked questions

The Fry and Dolch lists are in the public domain. Fry uses Australian spelling here (colour, centre). The school fonts are the AU School Handwriting Fonts, free under the SIL Open Font License.