There are 100 common words that recur frequently in much of the written material young children read and that they need when they write. Most of these are decodable, by sounding and blending, assuming the grapheme–phoneme correspondences are known, but only 26 of the high-frequency words are decodable by the end of Phase Two. Reading a group of these words each day, by applying grapheme–phoneme knowledge as it is acquired, will help children recognise them quickly. However, in order to read simple captions it is necessary also to know some words that have unusual or untaught GPCs (‘tricky’ words) and these need to be learned.
the to I go no
__. .. . .. ..
Resources
Caption containing the tricky word to be learned
Procedure
Explain that there are some words that have one, or sometimes two, tricky letters.
Read the caption, pointing to each word, then point to the word to be learned and read it again.
Write the word on the whiteboard.
Sound-talk the word and repeat putting sound lines and buttons (as illustrated above) under each phoneme and blending them to read the word.
Discuss the tricky bit of the word where the letters do not correspond to the sounds the children know (e.g. in go, the last letter does not represent the same sound as the children know in dog).
Read the word a couple more times and refer to it regularly throughout the day so that by the end of the day the children can read the word straight away without sounding out.
Children should be given lots of practice with sounding and blending the 26 decodable high-frequency words so that they will be able to read them ‘automatically’ as soon as possible. They also need practice with reading the five tricky words, paying attention to any known letter–sound correspondences.
Resources
Between five and eight high-frequency words, including decodable and tricky words, written on individual cards
Procedure
Display a word card.
Point to each letter in the word as the children sound-talk the letters (as far as is possible with tricky words) and read the word.
Say a sentence using the word, slightly emphasising the word.
Repeat 1–3 with each word card.
Display each word again, and repeat the procedure more quickly but without giving a sentence.
Repeat once more, asking the children to say the word without sounding it out.
Give the children a caption incorporating the high-frequency words to read at home.