SpellChirp

46 words · ages 7–8 · 2nd grade and Year 3

Dolch second grade: all 46 words

Forty-six words a child reads every day and spells wrong twice a week. Every word is below — copy them, print the page, or tap once to have SpellChirp hatch the lot with definitions, audio and syllables.
  1. always
  2. around
  3. because
  4. been
  5. before
  6. best
  7. both
  8. buy
  9. call
  10. cold
  11. does
  12. don't
  13. fast
  14. first
  15. five
  16. found
  17. gave
  18. goes
  19. green
  20. its
  21. made
  22. many
  23. off
  24. or
  25. pull
  26. read
  27. right
  28. sing
  29. sit
  30. sleep
  31. tell
  32. their
  33. these
  34. those
  35. upon
  36. us
  37. use
  38. very
  39. wash
  40. which
  41. why
  42. wish
  43. work
  44. would
  45. write
  46. your

Practise these 46 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 46 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.