SpellChirp

62 words · ages 6–7 · Year 2

Year 2 common exception words: all 62 words

Sixty-four more exceptions, and the first properly hard ones — beautiful, because. Every word is below — copy them, print the page, or tap once to have SpellChirp hatch the lot with definitions, audio and syllables.
  1. door
  2. floor
  3. poor
  4. because
  5. find
  6. kind
  7. mind
  8. behind
  9. child
  10. children
  11. wild
  12. climb
  13. most
  14. only
  15. both
  16. old
  17. cold
  18. gold
  19. hold
  20. told
  21. every
  22. everybody
  23. even
  24. great
  25. break
  26. steak
  27. pretty
  28. beautiful
  29. after
  30. fast
  31. last
  32. past
  33. father
  34. class
  35. grass
  36. pass
  37. plant
  38. path
  39. bath
  40. hour
  41. move
  42. prove
  43. improve
  44. sure
  45. sugar
  46. eye
  47. could
  48. should
  49. would
  50. who
  51. whole
  52. any
  53. many
  54. clothes
  55. busy
  56. people
  57. water
  58. again
  59. half
  60. money
  61. parents
  62. Christmas

Practise these 62 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 62 wordsPrint a practice sheet

Where this list comes from

The statutory word lists from the English National Curriculum (Department for Education, 2013), published under the Open Government Licence.

The words English primary schools are required to teach. Year 1 and 2 are the common exception words — the ones that break the phonics rules — and Years 3 to 6 are the statutory lists.

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.