100 Words

how we used Fry's word list to help our son learn to read

Although our youngest showed an interest in learning to read and write at around age four, it took another eight or so years before he was able to confidently and competently do so without help. These were years in which I, as a homeschooling mum, alternated between confident faith in his ability and sheer panic.

I tried many different techniques and strategies to improve his progress, and have written about them elsewhere, but one that stands out in my memory is using Fry’s 100 Words List.

I’m not sure where I came across the idea of teaching him to recognise and write the most commonly used words in our language but it made sense to us at the time. He’d already learned words he saw written frequently, like the names of family members, and could sight read words like LEGO, catalogue, Weetbix, and so on.

What interested me was finding that these 100 words actually make up half of all reading and writing we do. Giving our son the ability to decode these seemed to spur his development along.

I’m not dismissing the fact that the timing may have been just perfect for him. Because I only came across this list when he was around ten years of age I have no idea how effective it might have been when he was five or six! I suspect though, given the many different approaches we’d already tried, it probably wouldn’t have helped much.

I used the 'look, read, cover, write and check' method, choosing five words from the list as a spelling list each week. Many of these words are not the best words to introduce phonetically and are generally learned much later, by sight. Often by the time a child has phonetic pronunciation and reading under way these words simply fall into place without any effort. Not so Thomas, who never got the hang of decoding words phonetically at all. He tended to use whatever methods came to hand at the time, usually asking for help.

I also introduced these words in a sentence format, putting them in a context that was meaningful to him.

Once he had mastered about 70% of this list, reading began to fall into place fairly rapidly. He found that being able to recognise all the words between the nouns and verbs helped enormously. Overall we spent about a year doing our spelling list.