Sight word lists and games
All five Dolch lists, free to print, each with a practice game. And a note on why "heart words" is a better name than "sight words".
- Dolch pre-primer sight words 40 words · The first 40 — the words that make up a startling share of everything a beginner reads.
- Dolch primer sight words 52 words · The second list, usually taught across kindergarten and the start of first grade.
- Dolch first grade sight words 41 words · Forty-one more, for readers who already decode short words confidently.
- Dolch second grade sight words 46 words · Longer and less regular. Map the regular parts and learn only the heart part by heart.
- Dolch third grade sight words 41 words · The last list. By this point most of these are decodable if the phonics is solid.
Do not teach them as shapes
Whole-word memorisation is the old advice, and it does not scale. Most of a so-called sight word is perfectly regular; only a part of it is odd. Map the regular letters to their sounds, mark the heart part, and practise by retrieval rather than copying. That is what builds the automatic recognition that makes reading fluent, and it is why a child taught this way can also read words they have never seen.