Word JungleSpelling and sight words
The words that don’t play fair
Said, because, one — the words a child can’t sound their way to. Graded by age and drilled by ear, the way a spelling test actually works.
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What sight words are
Most words can be sounded out. These can’t, or not reliably: a child who attacks said phonetically arrives at “say-id”. Edward Dolch collected the worst offenders in 1936 and the list has barely moved since, because the words that break the rules are the common ones. Between them they account for something like half the words in a typical children’s book, which is why they get memorized rather than decoded.
The lists
Graded by age rather than by school year, because Dolch’s own grades are American and the mapping to other systems is approximate. Pick the one that matches the reader, not the one that matches the label.
| List | Age | Words | Starts with |
|---|---|---|---|
| First words | Ages 4–5 | 40 | a, and, away, big… |
| Next steps | Ages 5–6 | 52 | all, am, are, at… |
| Building up | Ages 6–7 | 41 | after, again, an, any… |
| Getting fluent | Ages 7–8 | 46 | always, around, because, been… |
| Tricky ones | Ages 8–9 | 41 | about, better, bring, carry… |
| Everyday things | Ages 5–7 | 93 | apple, baby, back, ball… |
Heard in a sentence, not copied
A spelling card that shows you the word is a handwriting exercise. So the word is read out instead — and then read out again inside a short sentence, which is what a teacher does and what this list in particular needs.
It needs it because these words collide. Their, there and they’re are one sound; so are to, too and two, one and won, ate and eight, no and know. Asked to spell the sound on its own, a child cannot be wrong, because there is no answer. The commonest words are exactly the ones English has the most collisions in, which is why a sight-word list is dense with them.
The sentence is on screen as well as in the ear, with the word itself left as a blank — “This is ____ house”. That gives away which word is meant and nothing at all about how it is spelled. It also rescues the words a device’s built-in voice mumbles: sleep is one soft consonant away from sleeve on several of them, and context repairs a mis-heard sound the way it always does.
Nothing is recorded and nothing is sent anywhere — the voice is the one already installed on the device. Where there is no voice at all, the blank fills itself in for a moment and empties again, which is weaker than hearing it but still recall rather than transcription.
Younger readers can switch to spot it: hear the word, read the sentence, and pick it out of four. Recognition first, spelling second.
This week’s spellings, as a deck
The lists above are a starting point, not the point. Paste in whatever came home — a newline, a comma or a semicolon between them, however they arrived — and they become a deck like any other, with their own records and their own trouble list.
Save one as a file and another family can open it and get their own copy. Everything stays on the device it was typed on; there is no account and nothing is uploaded, so a shared list travels the way a photocopy would — because someone sent it.
The same list, on paper
Every list here prints as a worksheet, and the list is the content rather than the sheet: the same words come out as a page to write three times, a page with letters missing, word shapes, ABC order, a sentence each, or a page of near misses to pick the right word out of. There are ten more on how words work — rhyme, syllables, prefixes and suffixes, plurals, contractions, homophones, synonyms and antonyms — and every sheet that has an answer prints the key on the page behind it.
Which is the half of practice a screen is bad at. A word typed on a keyboard is not a word written by hand, and a child who has done both remembers it better than one who has done either.
Practicing it properly
Words that come out wrong, or come out slowly, collect in a trouble list you can drill on their own. A word only counts as known once it’s right three times running and under four seconds — the same bar the times tables are held to, and for the same reason: recall, not working it out.
Short and frequent beats long and rare. Ten words a day will move a list faster than a whole list once a week.
This is spelling practice, not a reading program. It won’t teach phonics, it doesn’t follow a curriculum, and it has no opinion about how you teach reading — it drills the list you give it.