Do you struggle to teach high frequency words with tricky spellings to your students? These high-frequency word lists can be used to create a scope and sequence for teaching heart words to your students, using orthographic mapping to unpack words.
These word lists have been compiled with the following considerations:
Any top 100 high-frequency words will be found within Lists 1-4, along with other words that contain similar spelling patterns. Any easily decodable words e.g. ‘can’ or ‘am’ have been excluded.
Lists 5-8 contain words from the top 200 or 300 high-frequency word lists, as well as words with highly irregular or rare spelling patterns.
Please note- this is simply a suggested sequence for teaching high-frequency words. Feel free to adapt/adjust to suit the needs of your students and/or your school’s teaching programs.
My hope is that these lists will provide a useful starting point for teachers, and support the implementation of evidence-based explicit synthetic phonics instruction in your classrooms!
By using the alphabetic code to identify the different graphemes, students will be able to understand how to spell all words on the high frequency words list of any phonics or spelling program.
If you find these word lists helpful, you may like the PowerPoint Slides and Posters that complement these word lists.