Key points:
When students learn to read in the early elementary years, developing phonemic awareness, decoding skills, and blending typically take priority. Another essential component of fluent reading, however, is learning to read high-frequency and irregular words. While most phonics programs do address these words, instruction often stops at introduction or, at best, includes a single exposure activity embedded within a larger lesson.
As the Science of Reading continues to gain traction, educators must look beyond repetition and memorization and adopt strategies that help students understand why words sound the way they do.
Before outlining five such strategies, it is important to distinguish among the various labels ascribed to the words in question, the most common of which are listed below:
- high-frequency words
- trick words
- sight words
- heart words
- irregular words
- Fry words
- Dolch words
The term high-frequency words refers to words that appear frequently in books, especially those in decodable texts used by emerging readers. These words may or may not be decodable, but they account for a large percentage of the words students encounter in early reading. Edward Fry (Fry words) and E. W. Dolch (Dolch words) developed lists of the top 1000 and 220 words, respectively, found in printed English material (University of Florida Literacy Institute, 2025). These lists include words like it, like, and did, which, though decodable, are not necessarily accessible to beginning readers who have not secured all letter sounds and phonics rules yet.
These words are known as “temporarily irregular” words because they will eventually be decodable once a student learns the necessary phonics pattern (University of Florida Literacy Institute, 2025). However, learning these words allows readers to begin reading richer texts and developing fluency while simultaneously working on these skills.
Permanently irregular words, in contrast, contain letters that do not make their expected sounds and, consequently, are never fully decodable. These words may “trick” students or require them to learn the words by “sight” or by “heart,” which is where these labels originate.
Parsing out the nuances of these labels proves to be important because it emphasizes that many of these words, regardless of what category they belong, can actually be taught phonetically, with the exception of one or two phoneme-grapheme correspondences. Finding strategies to do so not only eliminates the need to memorize the words in their entirety but also sets students up for greater success in developing greater automaticity for reading these words.
Here are five strategies for teaching temporarily and permanently irregular words in the early elementary years:
Orthographic mapping: Orthographic mapping 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 attend to phoneme-grapheme relationships rather than memorizing words visually.
Hunt for the words in a meaningful context: After introducing one or two target words, provide students with a decodable text or familiar reading material and ask them to locate the words. This encourages students to recognize words in authentic contexts rather than in isolation and supports comprehension as students see how the words function within a story.
Add a kinesthetic component: Strategies such as 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. These movements reinforce phonemic awareness and support orthographic mapping by linking motor memory with auditory and visual input.
Marking: Word marking is a powerful, research-aligned strategy that helps students attend to the internal structure of irregular words rather than relying on visual memory alone. Teachers guide students through each letter in a word and mark it according to the sound it makes (i.e. long or short vowel), as well as indicate whether or not it is the expected sound with a symbol such as a heart or X over the letters that diverge from the standard pattern. This activity lends itself well 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.
Use the words in writing: Writing plays a critical role in solidifying irregular word learning. When students use target words in sentence construction, journals, or shared writing, they must retrieve and apply their knowledge independently. Doing so reinforces grapheme-sound connections and ensures that irregular words are not only recognized during reading but also 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 extension of early literacy development. By grounding instruction in the science of reading, educators can move beyond rote memorization and equip young learners with the tools they need for fluent, confident reading.
