Sight Words

There are two families here. The Dolch lists are the classroom classic: 221 service words in five levels, from pre-primer to third grade, in the version we use, plus 97 nouns. They are public domain and match most of the worksheets and word walls you will meet. Our high-frequency lists are separate: five bands of 100 words, ranked by how common each word is in a large body of modern text.

Every page follows the same pattern as the rest of the site. Play the list as hangman, read each word with its difficulty score, then print a worksheet with an answer key. Start with the Dolch level that matches your reader, and move to the sentence page once a level feels secure.

Choose by purpose. For a five-year-old just starting out, begin with the pre-primer list and keep sessions short: eight or ten words, a few minutes, then stop. For an older student, an adult learner or an English class, the high-frequency bands usually fit better, because they hold the words that appear most in current writing.

Hangman suits this work because a guess only lands if the player thinks about the letters inside the word, and the finished word is spelled out in order on screen. It is a spelling and attention game, not a substitute for reading real text, so pair it with books and sentences where the words appear in context.