Making High-Frequency Word Memorization Fun

To read and write fluently, your child must quickly and automatically recognize and spell the most common words. Unfortunately, the most common words are often the hardest words for beginning readers to learn. Many high-frequency words (of, and, the, is) are meaningless, abstract, connecting words. Another challenge of learning high-frequency words is that many of these words have irregular spellings or pronunciations. (Cunningham & Allington, 2016).

High-frequency words occur often, children who read and write will encounter them in their reading and need to spell them as they write. The more high-frequency words your child knows the easier reading and writing will become.

 How We Practice High Frequency Words

My daughter’s teacher provided a list of high-frequency words (which they call “snap” words) that they were expected to know by the end of the year. I wrote each of the words on an index card for us to use for typical flashcard practice and to use in activities like the ones shared below.

I also took a look at Fry’s high-frequency word (also commonly called “sight words”) list to see the 100 most common high-frequency words in texts. The Fry list and Dolch list are the most commonly used list of high-frequency ranked by how many times they appear in texts. I scanned the list for words that my daughter was seeing in many of her favorite books and words that she typically writes. Based on the Fry list, I wrote 15 new words on index cards to add to the words we were working on this year. As she is able to easily read AND write these words, we will change them out over time. I try to leave several words she can easily read and write in the mix so she can continue to have confidence with reading and writing high-frequency words .

My daughter is really motivated to write and loves writing books. (Look for our upcoming articles and videos about writing books!) I had a conversation with my daughter about practicing her high-frequency words so she could write faster which would help her hold onto her ideas for her story and get her books finished faster (which was a big motivator for my little author).

Specific things we do to practice her high-frequency words:

* Cheers and chants

* Sorting the words based on features (beginning letters, number of letters, number of vowels, vowel teams/spellings)

* Making sentences with the high-frequency words

* Slap it

1. Spread out several high-frequency words (some your child is really familiar with and some new words)
2. Tell your child to slap the card with the high-frequency word on it when you call it out
3. Call out a high-frequency word
4. Encourage your child to look closely and slap the card of the word you just said.
5. If your child doesn’t recognize it easily, you can give some clues (It has four letters)

Encourage Repeated Practice

After practicing her high-frequency words, my daughter recognized how many more words she could write without help from me or a word bank. She is really proud that she is becoming more independent. This has also increased her motivation to practice her high-frequency words. 🙂

Please leave a comment and share some of your ideas for practicing high-frequency words.