Educators can move beyond rote memorization and give young learners the tools they need for fluent, confident reading, writes Kendall Stallings, a kindergarten teacher in Fairfield County, Conn., in an eSchool News commentary.
Phonemic awareness, decoding skills, and blending typically take priority when students learn to read in the early elementary years. Learning to read high-frequency and irregular words is another essential for fluent reading. Most phonics programs address these words, but instruction is often limited.
As the Science of Reading continues to gain traction, educators must adopt strategies that help students understand why words sound the way they do.
High-frequency words appear frequently in books, especially those in decodable texts used by emerging readers. These words account for a large percentage of the words students encounter in early reading, and include words like it, like, and did, which, though decodable, are not necessarily accessible to beginning readers who have not yet secured all letter sounds and phonics rules.
These are “temporarily irregular” words because they will eventually be decodable once a student learns the necessary phonics pattern. Learning these words allows readers to begin reading richer texts and developing fluency while simultaneously working on these skills.
Permanently irregular words contain letters that do not make their expected sounds and are never fully decodable.
Many of these words, regardless of what category they belong, can be taught phonetically.
Here are five strategies for teaching temporarily and permanently irregular words in the early elementary years:
1) Orthographic mapping: This requires students to physically break words down by sound, not letter. Manipulatives such as connecting cubes or chips may be used or students may simply write them in different colored boxes or using different colored ink. For example, ship contains three sounds because sh represents one phoneme. Similarly, like has three sounds, with -ke representing a single sound due to the silent e. This process helps students study phoneme-grapheme relationships rather than memorizing words visually.
2) Hunt for the words in a meaningful context: After introducing one or two target words, give students a decodable text or familiar reading material and ask them to locate the words. Students recognize words in authentic contexts rather than in isolation and comprehension improves as students see how the words function within a story.
3) Add a kinesthetic component: Tapping out phonemes on the arm, tracing letters while saying corresponding sounds, or using hand motions to represent each sound in a word help students physically experience the structure of words. Movements reinforce phonemic awareness and support orthographic mapping by linking motor memory with auditory and visual input.
4) Marking: Word marking helps students focus on the internal structure of irregular words rather than relying on visual memory alone. Students are guided through each letter in a word and mark it according to the sound it makes (i.e. long or short vowel), and they mark the expected sound with a symbol such as a heart or X over the letters that diverge from the standard pattern. This lends itself to reviewing skills over time as students learn new skills. For example, the word the is fully irregular until students learn the th digraph, at which point only the e remains irregular.
5) Use the words in writing: Writing is critical in solidifying irregular word learning. When using target words in sentence construction, journals, or shared writing, students must retrieve and apply their knowledge independently. This reinforces grapheme-sound connections and ensures that irregular words are both recognized during reading and produced accurately in writing. Having students write pattern books with these words is particularly helpful because they provide students with meaningful repetition. An example may include writing books that include sentence starters such as, “I like,” “You can,” “The dog and cat are,” etc.
When high-frequency words are taught through explicit instruction, aligned phonics, and meaningful practice, they become a natural part of early literacy development. Grounding instruction in the science of reading enables educators to move beyond rote memorization to give young learners the tools for fluent, confident reading.
eSchool News
