Welcome to Pentrepoeth Junior School

FAMILY LEARNING

LITERACY WITH MRS WRIGHT

High- Frequency Words

Parents frequently ask what they can do at home to support their child’s learning - including the area of literacy. Teachers or even your own child might mention High-frequency words.

v What are they?

v What can you do to help?

High-frequency words are the words that appear most often in printed materials. They can be difficult to read or spell because many do not lend themselves to building “phonically” e.g children can sound out the word “dad” but might have difficulty with “was”. For children to become fluent readers ( and later on accurate spellers) they need to develop instant recognition of these words.

Your child will be working on these and other essential words in school but the more they practise reading and spelling them the more confident they will become.

 Words can be practised at home in a fun way. You might want to print off the words and stick some on a fridge door or make small flash cards for a quick game of word recognition for 5 minutes while tea is cooking. You could print off an extra set to play “snap”. Children might like to practise writing words in different coloured pens ( joined up writing helps to reinforce spelling). A tried and tested way of learning to spell these words is the LOOK SAY COVER WRITE and CHECK method. Children read the word aloud, say the letter names, cover up the word, have a go at writing it then uncover the word and check their attempt.

Below are the 45 most common words found in reading material.

Below are the rest of the essential High- frequency words. Once again it is hard to overstate the importance of learning and retaining these basic sight reading words.

In addition to the above words children need to be able

to read and eventually spell  the days of the week, months of the year, common colours and numbers to twenty.

You can also buy our “Learning At Home” booklet from the school.  This contains the next 100 Medium- frequency words along with other helpful information.

Useful Websites

www.bbc.co.uk/schools/spellits 

good quality games with an information section for parents

www.bbc.co.uk/schools/wordsandpictures/hfwords/starwords

game to practise high-frequency words-

 for Key Stage 1 but don’t be put off

www.ictgames.com/dinosaurworldrepeat

a sight recognition game of High-frequency words

www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/interactive/literacy

an excellent selection of spelling and other literacy games and

activities- well worth a visit

www.familylearning.org.uk/sight_words_games

an excellent site for parents containing games and information.

If you have found this useful or have any other comments please do not hesitate to email me at the school. If you have any tips or suggestions to share with other parents perhaps we could post them on the website.

Thank you

Mrs Gina Wright- Literacy Subject Leader.