Dolch & Fry Sight Word Flashcards

The lists

Fry's First 25 by default, plus all five Dolch lists, from pre-primer up to third grade. Or type your own words and ignore the lists entirely.

Four to eight cards a page, and the backs can be turned off if you only want the word.

What a sight word is

A word a child should recognise instantly, without decoding it.

Two things make a word a candidate. It appears extremely often — the Dolch and Fry lists are frequency lists, and between them they account for a very large share of the words in any children's book. Or it cannot be sounded out reliably: said, one, who, they all break the phonics rules a child has just been taught.

They are not a replacement for phonics

Worth being clear, because the two get set against each other and should not be.

Systematic phonics is how children learn to read, and the evidence for that is strong. Sight words are a small set of high-frequency and irregular words learned alongside it, so that a child reading a sentence is not stopped four times by the, was and said. Teach phonics, and use these for the words phonics does not cover.

Fry or Dolch

Both are frequency lists, compiled decades apart, and they overlap heavily.

Dolch is organised by grade level and is the commoner choice in schools, so its lists give you a ready-made sequence to work through. Fry's is ordered strictly by frequency instead, which makes those first 25 the highest-value words in the language by a wide margin, and a reasonable place to start with any child on any curriculum.

How to work through them

A few at a time. Five new words is plenty; a child who has met twenty in one sitting has learnt none of them.

Aim for instant recognition rather than correctness. A word that takes three seconds to work out is not yet a sight word, and the useful test is speed rather than accuracy. Once a word is instant, retire the card and bring it back a fortnight later to check.

Uses beyond drilling

Lay several on a table and have the child find the one you say. Hide them round a room. Snap, or pairs, with two sets. Build sentences from cards on the floor.

All of those are better than a deck worked through in order, because a five-year-old will do them for longer.

Related: alphabet and number flashcards for letters, and the handwriting practice generator to write the same words out.