I am a HUGE advocate of teaching emerging readers Dolch Words. As you all know, I am a massive advocate of phonics, but only as part of balanced approach to literacy instruction. Sure, kids need to learn the “code” behind our language so that they can “sound out” unfamiliar words. We also want to develop fluent readers, however, and not the have him/her sound out every word on the page. To do this we need to build up a “Lexicon” or library of words that children instantly recognise and read. Sight words account for a large percentage (up to 75%) of the words used in beginning children’s print materials.
Dolch words offer serious bang for your buck in this regard. There are 220 words in the carefully graded list. (adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, and verbs) along with a supplementary list of 95 simple nouns. Ideally, all young readers should learn these words by sight.
I teach the Pre-Primer level to my Junior Infant pupils. We are making pretty good progress if I do say so myself 🙂 I create the following format of worksheet for the first 16 words:

I am sure that  some of you might find these Dolch Word Cut-out sheets useful with your class or indeed your own child. Please let me know what you think by leaving a comment below. Would you like to see more of these Dolch Word Cut-out sheets for the remaining Pre-Primer words? Would some of you prefer Comic Sans as a font? We teach pre-cursive so these worksheets are perfect for my kiddos. Anyway, let me know your thoughts.

Please click here to dolch word cut out worksheets of Dolch Word Cut-out sheets. Apologies for the typo in the earlier version.

Have fun,

Miss Mernagh 🙂