SpellChirp

41 words · ages 8–9 · 3rd grade and Year 4

Dolch third grade: all 41 words

The last forty-one. Finish these and the whole 220 are done. Every word is below — copy them, print the page, or tap once to have SpellChirp hatch the lot with definitions, audio and syllables.
  1. about
  2. better
  3. bring
  4. carry
  5. clean
  6. cut
  7. done
  8. draw
  9. drink
  10. eight
  11. fall
  12. far
  13. full
  14. got
  15. grow
  16. hold
  17. hot
  18. hurt
  19. if
  20. keep
  21. kind
  22. laugh
  23. light
  24. long
  25. much
  26. myself
  27. never
  28. only
  29. own
  30. pick
  31. seven
  32. shall
  33. show
  34. six
  35. small
  36. start
  37. ten
  38. today
  39. together
  40. try
  41. warm

Practise these 41 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 41 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.