📘 Why some words you just know

What you’ll learn

1. The word you already ownHear that a sight word is any word stored so you can read it at a glance, and that the little glue words turn up first.The is already sitting in your head. Ehri: sight is every stored word, not a club of tricky spellings. Kindergarten names the glue words that hold a sentence up.
2. Look at the letters, not the blobStore a word by mapping letters to sounds, and mark the odd bit instead of memorising an outline.The outline is a trap. The still has letters. Most children need several meetings. In said, s and d are honest; ai is the stranger.
3. Words that keep turning upRefuse a giant high-frequency list, blend the regular everyday words, and treat only a short pile as exception words.The framework bans list-learning. And and stop blend. Said and the have an odd bit. Year 1’s pile includes house, school, friend.
4. How a glance-word is bornLook at every letter, say the sounds you know, mark the odd bit, and put the word back in a sentence.Year 1’s note-the-odd-bit line is the method. Connected text finishes the storing. A short pile, not a two-hundred-card drill.
5. On a real pageUse glue words in a real sentence, refuse to guess from a picture, and notice the on a familiar page tonight.The cat is on the mat. The picture is not a hint. Friend lives in a line. Tonight, count the. The open question is why some mouths need only one meeting.

Questions this course answers

Grounded in trusted sources

• Department for Education, National curriculum in England: English programmes of study (published 16 July 2014). Skilled word reading involves both the speedy working out of unfamiliar printed words (decoding) and the speedy recognition of familiar printed words. Year 1 word reading: read common exception words, noting unusual correspondences between spelling and sound and where these occur in the word; pupils should be helped to read words without overt sounding and blending after a few encounters; reread these books to build up fluency and confidence in word reading. Year 2: read further common exception words, noting unusual correspondences; read most words quickly and accurately, without overt sounding and blending, when they have been frequently encountered. By the beginning of Year 2, pupils’ reading of common exception words should be secure so those words can be read easily and automatically. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-english-programmes-of-study/national-curriculum-in-england-english-programmes-of-study
• Department for Education, English Appendix 1: Spelling. Year 1 common exception words (non-statutory examples): the, a, do, to, today, of, said, says, are, were, was, is, his, has, I, you, your, they, be, he, me, she, we, no, go, so, by, my, here, there, where, love, come, some, one, once, ask, friend, school, put, push, pull, full, house, our. Pupils’ attention should be drawn to the grapheme-phoneme correspondences that do and do not fit in with what has been taught so far. The only common English word ending in ou is you. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7ccc06ed915d63cc65ce61/English_Appendix_1_-_Spelling.pdf
• Department for Education, The reading framework (updated 11 July 2023). Common exception words (sometimes called tricky words) contain GPCs that are unusual or have not yet been taught; they are kept to a minimum in the early stages, for example said, to, was, I, the, me, no, of, all, he, you, they, she, we, are, my, be, some, so, were, go. Pupils are taught to read and spell these by noting the part that is an exception — in said, s and d are usual, ai for /e/ is not. High-frequency words: pupils should not be asked to learn lists of high-frequency words; they can read most of these by saying the sounds and blending them once the GPCs have been taught (e.g. mum, came); synthetic phonics programmes teach others systematically as exception words (e.g. said, to). Most pupils must decode a word several times in different contexts before they can read it at a glance. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-reading-framework-teaching-the-foundations-of-literacy
• Common Core State Standards Initiative, English Language Arts, Reading: Foundational Skills. RF.K.3.c: Read common high-frequency words by sight (e.g., the, of, to, you, she, my, is, are, do, does). RF.1.3.g: Recognize and read grade-appropriate irregularly spelled words. RF.K.1.b: Recognize that spoken words are represented in written language by specific sequences of letters. https://www.thecorestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RF/K/ and https://www.thecorestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RF/1/
• Linnea C. Ehri, “Development of Sight Word Reading: Phases and Findings,” in The Science of Reading: A Handbook, ed. Margaret J. Snowling and Charles Hulme (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 135–154. Sight word reading is not limited to high-frequency or irregularly spelled words but includes all words readers can read from memory; it happens automatically, not as a chosen strategy. Visuophonological connections — bonding graphemes to phonemes — explain rapid sight-word learning better than remembering a word’s visual outline. Reitsma (1983): four practice trials were enough for Dutch first graders to read practiced spellings faster than untrained homophonic alternatives. Share (2004): one exposure enabled Israeli third graders to retain specific spelling information a month later. https://sites.pitt.edu/~perfetti/PDF/Ehri.pdf
• Institute of Education Sciences, What Works Clearinghouse, Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade (NCEE 2016-4008, July 2016, revised December 2019), Foorman et al. Recommendation 4: ensure that each student reads connected text every day to support reading accuracy, fluency, and comprehension. Do not encourage guessing unknown words from first letters or pictures. Model accurate word identification and teach self-monitoring. https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/Docs/PracticeGuide/wwc_foundationalreading_040717.pdf

Every Wunder lesson is built from real, reputable sources — never invented.

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