Word List
Kindergarten Sight Words
The 25 most common words in English, from the Fry list, sorted for a kindergartner: 16 to sound out and only nine to learn by heart, with worksheets for both.
How many sight words should a kindergartner know?
There is no required number. The Common Core standard for kindergarten, RF.K.3c, asks children to “read common high-frequency words by sight” and names ten examples without giving a count. School lists commonly ask for anywhere from twenty-five to a hundred. Reading researcher Timothy Shanahan suggests “perhaps 20 words or so, with at least 10 of those being high frequency words” by the end of kindergarten.
This list is sized to match: 25 words, of which only nine need memorizing. How to teach sight words covers how to practice them, how much is enough, and what to do if your school’s list is much longer. For the nine that do need memorizing, sight word games has nine ways to get the turns in with nothing but paper.
Why these 25 words?
They are the first 25 words on the Fry list, Edward Fry’s ranking of the most common words in English. Fry built it in the 1950s and updated it in 1980, and the full list runs to 1,000 words in groups of a hundred. In a Reading Rockets column, Shanahan puts the first hundred at about half the words a child meets in any text, so these 25 turn up on almost every page your child will read.
Fry did not assign grades, so the split is ours. These pages give kindergarten the first 25, first grade words 26 to 100, and second grade the hundred after that. Twenty-five is close to Shanahan’s twenty for kindergarten, and with first grade’s 75 it makes the hundred he recommends by the end of first grade.
Which of these words can your child sound out?
Sixteen of the 25 follow regular spelling patterns, so they are phonics practice rather than memory work, though eleven use a pattern that comes a little after the first letter sounds. Only nine have a part that no pattern explains, and those are the ones to learn by heart.
The sort below starts from what most kindergartners can do by the end of the year: say the sound each letter makes and blend short words like cat and sun, which is what CVC words practice. It sorts words by how they are read, not how they are spelled. A word can be easy to read and still awkward to spell.
If your child knows their letter sounds but cannot yet push them together into a word, start with that instead: my child knows letter sounds but can’t sound out words.
What if your school uses the Dolch list?
At this level the two lists barely differ. Edward Dolch’s list holds 220 words grouped by grade band, plus 95 nouns, and 21 of the 25 words here are on its pre-primer and primer levels. The other four (of, as, his, from) are on its first grade level. The same sort works for Dolch: reading specialists Linda Farrell, Michael Hunter and Tina Osenga, writing for Reading Rockets, count 138 of the 220 Dolch words as decodable once all the regular spelling patterns are taught. The Dolch sight words page splits every Dolch level into the words to sound out and the heart words.
Which kindergarten sight words can your child sound out?
These 16 can be sounded out. Five need nothing but letter sounds: a child who can blend c-a-t can read a-n-d, i-n and o-n. The other eleven use a pattern that comes a little after the first letter sounds: th in that, with and this, s saying /z/ in is, as and his, a vowel that says its name at the end of a word (a, he, be, I), and or in for. Read those together and name the pattern until it has been taught.
Treat all of them as reading practice rather than memory work: say the sounds, then the word. Drilling them as whole shapes teaches a child to guess at words they could have read. If the first five are hard, start with CVC words, and words with th has more practice for that, with and this. On the sound boxes sheet, your child says each word and writes one spelling in each box, one box per sound.
- and
- a
- in
- is
- that
- it
- he
- for
- on
- as
- with
- his
- I
- at
- be
- this
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Printables for Kindergarten Sight Words to Sound Out
Which kindergarten sight words have to be learned by heart?
These nine are heart words, words that break the usual spelling patterns and need to be learned by heart.
- the
- of
- to
- you
- was
- are
- they
- have
- from
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Printables for Kindergarten Heart Words
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