High Frequency Words
In 2007, The Oxford University Press did a research study. It was an investigation of high frequency words in young children’s writing and reading development in Australian schools. The result was a list of 307 and then more recently 401 words, that appeared most frequently in 4000 writing samples of students in their first three years of school.
This list is often used by schools as a resource to assist students with making meaning in their reading.
The list can be found in this link
Below are some tips to help you integrate the words into your routine reading each night.
• Be a reading detective and locate HFWs in their environment and in print materials they encounter in their daily lives.
• Go on a hidden word hunt and find little HFWs within bigger words, for example ‘come’ contains ‘me’.
• Play enjoyable games, such as Tic-Tac-Toe and Memory.
• Reveal a HFW flash card and respond in various funny voices, for example a robot, squeaky and monster voices.
• Invent sentences or create sentences from a known book using HFW flashcards, for instance, I go to mum.
• Create an ‘I Spy’ word mystery by offering clues to hunt for a HFW, for example, a three letter word starting with d, ‘dad’ or a word that rhymes with ‘bike’, ‘like’.
• Match HFW flash cards when encountering the words in a book, for example ‘the’ flash card within the book Mrs Wishy-Washy, The dog is in the tub.
• Sort words into grouping, for example alphabetical order, ‘A – at’ and number of letters ‘two letters- is, in, it’
• Keep a running tally to record the number of encounters of each word.
Reading Log
Handwriting – right handed
Handwriting – left handed