Dear Families,
Let’s talk about high frequency words.
High frequency words are words that occur very often in print. Recognizing these words will allow your child to read fluently.
The term high frequency words has often been confused with the terms irregular words or sight words.
Examples of sight words would include the words: said, the, was, does & busy.
Examples of high frequency words include the words: and, see, is, it, but, for & can.
A common instructional practice has been to place these words on flash cards and ask students to memorize them as whole visual units and not use their phonics skills. We have learned quite a bit about how we learn to read and we now know our brain learns to read best when we train it to connect letters to sounds, not memorize words as visual letter strings. Many of these high frequency words are completely phonetically regular, meaning children can use phonics to decode them. Others may have one unexpected part, usually the vowel, but there are other parts of the word where a student can use their phonics skills. We will be teaching students to decode and map the letter sound correspondences for the words they encounter. This is the process and the skill they will need to decode and read words accurately and automatically and with practice, read words they encounter “as if by sight”.
You can help your child at home too! Once your child has been taught how to decode a high frequency/trick word, practicing the word cards shared with you through Fundations, is one way you can provide the repeated exposure. You can also listen to your child read aloud. When your child comes to an unknown word, encourage your child to pay attention to all the letters and the sounds they represent in the entire word, or “sound it out” and then blend the sounds together! By doing so you will be supporting your child in establishing the skills and processes that lead to skilled reading.
Please feel free to reach out with any questions you may have. We are partners in your child’s journey to literacy!
