SpellChirp

40 words · ages 4–5 · pre-K and reception

Dolch pre-primer: all 40 words

The first forty. Where sight reading starts. Every word is below — copy them, print the page, or tap once to have SpellChirp hatch the lot with definitions, audio and syllables.
  1. a
  2. and
  3. away
  4. big
  5. blue
  6. can
  7. come
  8. down
  9. find
  10. for
  11. funny
  12. go
  13. help
  14. here
  15. I
  16. in
  17. is
  18. it
  19. jump
  20. little
  21. look
  22. make
  23. me
  24. my
  25. not
  26. one
  27. play
  28. red
  29. run
  30. said
  31. see
  32. the
  33. three
  34. to
  35. two
  36. up
  37. we
  38. where
  39. yellow
  40. you

Practise these 40 words, free

One tap puts the whole list in the nest. Each word arrives with a definition a child can read, audio and its syllables — then SpellChirp reads them out, marks the spelling and brings back the ones that went wrong. No account needed to start, and no advertising on either plan.

Add all 40 wordsPrint a practice sheet

Where this list comes from

Compiled by Edward William Dolch in 1936 from the words most common in children's books. Long out of copyright and in the public domain.

The 220 words that make up around half of everything a child reads, plus 95 picture nouns. Most cannot be sounded out — they have to be known on sight, which is why they turn up in spelling homework year after year.

How to practise a list this long

Not all at once. Five to ten words a week is the pace that sticks; a list of a hundred is a term’s work, not a weekend’s, and a child who meets ten words five times learns more than one who meets fifty once.

Sight words are the ones that cannot be sounded out, so sounding them out is the wrong tool. Look at the shape of the whole word, say it, cover it, write it — then check the letters against the original rather than the sound.

Count a word as learned when it has been spelled correctly on three separate days. That is the rule SpellChirp uses, and it is roughly where a word stops needing to be looked up.