Students need to be given this bank of words and explicitly taught how to phoneme grapheme map them because 70% of these words are easily decodable because they are phonetic.

The rest of the words are entirely phonetic and decodable. That’s only 30% of the words on the list that are irregular, including the words with only one phoneme/letter that is irregular. There are only 33 words on that list that are irregular high-frequency words. Yet, Science of Reading Research (SoR) found students can read 90% of all single syllable words they see if they learn to read those 109 words and have some basic phonics knowledge! One hundred nine words (and their derivatives) account for 50% of all the words children will encounter when reading. And, not even 100% of those six irregular words are completely irregular it may just be part of the word. So, not even 50% of the words that make up a quarter of the words in print are irregular. Of those 13 words, only six are considered irregular high-frequency words or heart words. Of the high-frequency words, there are 13 of them that account for more than 25% of the words in print. These are really important for students to learn. A high-frequency word is one that shows up more frequently in a text. But, if we focus on phonics and bring our instruction down to the phoneme level, we can build skilled readers. These are the irregular high-frequency words students are taught to memorize because they break the English rules. You may have heard rumblings about “heart words” before. So, I’m going to share how you can use word mapping, specifically phoneme grapheme mapping, to teach your students high-frequency words, including heart words. However, most of them are actually phonetic and decodable. Unfortunately, the belief is that students must memorize high-frequency words because they aren’t phonetic or decodable. We’ve been teaching sight words in classrooms for decades and decades.

Phoneme grapheme mapping grid