A number of words, such as ‘the’, ‘said’, ‘he’, ‘was’ and ‘you’ occur quite frequently in children’s books and some people argue that we should teach children to read and spell these high-frequency words first.
There is some logic to this argument, but we feel that only the high-frequency words with straightforward spellings should be taught initially.
Straightforward (regular) spelling patterns are the ones that are used most frequently in a large number of words. The words mentioned in the paragraph above have more unusual (irregular) spelling patterns. Some people call these tricky words, common exception words or sight words.
Teaching irregular spelling patterns before they’ve mastered the more fundamental ones could confuse some children because the same letters can represent different sounds.
So, in the early stages, the focus should be on learning the most frequent (regular) spelling patterns, not the most frequent words.
Once children know the letter/sound relationships in the most frequent spelling patterns they can spell a much larger number of words than would be possible if time had been focussed on learning ‘sight words’.
What’s more, children can learn the trickier spelling patterns more easily after they’ve mastered the basics.
With a good grasp of the fundamentals of phonics, irregular spellings can be learned in a fairly systematic way, as we discuss in the section ‘Learning to spell tricky words’ in another of our spelling articles.
Incidentally, many high frequency words do have common spelling patterns; for example, ‘and’, ‘in’, ‘it’, ‘on’, ‘at’, ‘but’, ‘can’, ‘up’, ‘had’, ‘went’, ‘not’, ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’. These words should be taught early alongside other regular words.
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