The words

Tap any word to hear it. 173 of these 315 words are in the app, where each has its own sentence.

Pre-primer, 40 words

Primer, 52 words

First grade, 41 words

Second grade, 46 words

Third grade, 41 words

Dolch nouns, 95 words

A separate list, usually learned alongside the pre-primer and primer levels. It is printed here in lowercase for consistency; sources print Christmas and Santa Claus capitalized. The dated entries, kitty, robin and Santa Claus among them, are a reminder of how old the list is.

Where the Dolch list comes from

The Dolch list sets 95 nouns aside on their own and keeps 220 service words: the articles, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, verbs and adjectives that hold sentences together and almost never carry a picture. Those 220 are split into five levels, pre-primer, primer, first, second and third grade, and the level names are the reason a parent hears about Dolch at all. The University of Florida Literacy Institute notes that E. W. Dolch identified the 220 most common words encountered in text children read in 1936. The Utah Education Network says the 220 words generally make up from 50 to 75 percent of the reading material students encounter.

Five minutes a day at home

Never work from the whole list. Find the level your child is on, test it once to see which words are missing, and then work only on three to five of the missing ones at a time. Show a card, say the word, have your child say it, spell it aloud, then say it whole. Shuffle and repeat until each comes back in about a second. Begin the next session with those words before adding new ones, and keep everything learned in one growing stack for a quick reread. When a word is secure, put it in a short phrase so it transfers to reading. That sequence comes straight from a published teaching routine, and it is the whole method.

How this fits with phonics

Dolch was a supporter of whole-word teaching, and that part of his thinking has not held up. Most of the 220 can be sounded out by a child who has been taught the common letter patterns, and the federal What Works Clearinghouse guide tells teachers to do exactly that: apply letter sound knowledge to the regular high-frequency words and reserve whole-word teaching for the genuinely irregular ones. Used that way the list is still valuable, because it tells you which words are worth the practice time. Used as a memorization list it competes with the phonics instruction that actually builds a reader. The list is a priority order, not a method.

Practice tips

  • Test one level, not the whole list, and work only on the words that came back slowly or wrong.
  • Three to five words per session. A word is learned when it is read in about a second with no hesitation.
  • Sort the level into words that can be sounded out and words that cannot, and give the by-heart treatment only to the second group.
  • Keep learned words in an envelope and unlearned ones clipped outside it, so your child can see the pile move.
  • Learn the 95 nouns through pictures and objects rather than cards. They are concrete in a way the service words are not.

Related lists

  • Dolch pre-primer sight words: Pre-primer is the first Dolch level: 40 words, including a, and, I, in, is, the, to and you.
  • Dolch primer sight words: Primer is the second Dolch level and the largest: 52 words, from all and am through will, with and yes.
  • Fry sight words: Edward Fry's Instant Words are 1,000 words ranked by how often they appear in print, taught in hundreds.

Sources