Well, as we speak this wonderful language called English, it means that there are lots of common words that are not phonetically plausible. There is not really any way of teaching them except boring lists but you can turn the lists into something a little more exciting.
Jude has been learning to read his first 45 high frequency words, so to make it fun for him I put them in sets of 12 on to a racetrack with a car-character from one of his favourite TV shows. As he learnt to read each word he coloured in that section of track and when he got to the top I bought him that car as a prize. Here are his completed Racetracks:
When Jude had learnt to read all 45, we went back to the beginning and he has been learning to spell the words – hence the ticks and smiley faces. As he has nearly finished this he is ready to move on the next boring list which is the first 100 high frequency words. He has moved on from Roary the Racing car and is now into Super-heroes so he has asked me to make him a Spider man and a Power Ranger word list. So here they are:
You would not believe how much Jude loves this Spider man word list. He actually begs to be able to do his words and sometimes cries when I tell him to put it away. Sometimes having an obsessive child is quite handy!
November 21st, 2012 at 1:01 pm
Where do you find the lists with Roary? They look like fun, though first I need to get some ink for the printer!!
November 25th, 2012 at 1:39 pm
I made them Janelle. In publisher. I’ll email them to you if you want.
December 10th, 2012 at 10:07 am
Good morning,
My boyfriend and I run a teaching resources website called Early Learning HQ and we have some high frequency word teaching resources here: http://www.earlylearninghq.org.uk/literacy/high-frequency-words/.
I hope they are useful to you, maybe you could pop a link on your website to us if they are? Thank you
.
Abby.
March 17th, 2013 at 9:01 pm
Ha ha… I was just online around and took a glimpse at these feedback. I can’t believe that there’s still this much fascination. Thanks for posting about this.