Dolch sight words

Practise on screen shows one word at a time. The child reads it aloud and you tap Read it or Still learning. A word they miss comes back a few cards later, and the end of the round lists the ones that needed a second go, so you know which to print.

Word lists print one level a page, with a box by each word to tick when it's read straight away. Flash cards print 12 or 8 to a sheet with dashed lines to cut along; they're one-sided, so there's no need to line up the backs. Tick more than one level to print them all in one go.

The word search splits each level into parts of 12 to 16 words, in a 12 by 12 grid with words running across and down only. One-letter words, a and I, are left out because there's nothing to find. Change the words or the grid and the answer key follows.

Edward William Dolch published the list in a 1936 article, "A Basic Sight Vocabulary", in The Elementary School Journal, and again in his 1948 book Problems in Reading. He took it from children's books of his day, which is why kitty and Santa Claus are on it. There are 220 service words, split into pre-primer (40), primer (52), first grade (41), second grade (46) and third grade (41), and a separate list of 95 nouns.

Dolch said that between 50% and 75% of the words in schoolbooks, library books, newspapers and magazines were on his list. That was in 1936, so treat it as history rather than a measure of books today.

Copies of the list online don't all agree. Wikipedia's version adds left to second grade and goat, woman and women to the nouns, and leaves out good-bye, which gives 221 words and 97 nouns. We checked it word by word against two other copies, which agree with each other and with Dolch's totals of 220 and 95, and used theirs.

Most of the 220 words can be sounded out with ordinary phonics. Words like the, said and was are the awkward ones. Reading researchers such as Mark Seidenberg and Stanislas Dehaene argue that we don't read whole words by their shape, and plenty of teachers now teach the Dolch words with phonics: sound out the regular parts, and point out the tricky letter or two.

Either way the list is a handy checklist of the small words that turn up on every page of an early reader. A child who knows them on sight has more attention left for the longer words.