If you’ve ever wondered why your students keep forgetting high-frequency words, even after lots of practice, you’re not alone.
Practice is important. But that should come after we’ve explicitly taught the word—how it sounds, how it’s spelled, and what it means.
Here are three common mistakes that keep kids stuck:
1. Starting with memorization instead of mapping When we ask students to memorize words as whole shapes, we skip the process the brain actually uses to store them.
Instead, we need to have students break a word into its sounds and spell each sound. This promotes an important mental process called orthographic mapping.
2. Promoting the "English is crazy" myth It’s easy to tell kids that English doesn’t make sense—especially when we come across words that don’t fit simple phonics rules. But the truth is, most so-called “irregular” words actually do make sense once we look closely. When we teach students why words are spelled as they are, we help them see that English is logical and learnable.
3. Forgetting to focus on meaning It can be hard to define abstract words like of and the. That’s why it’s so important to give a kid-friendly definition and use the word in different contexts during instruction.
When we combine all three pieces—sound, spelling, and meaning—students can finally store the word for good.
In our brand new resource, High Frequency Word Lessons with Decodable Text, each lesson gives you everything you need to teach a word clearly and efficiently.
You’ll get:
Step-by-step routines for introducing each word
Built-in decoding and mapping practice
Decodable sentences and short stories for real reading application
It’s a resource that helps you teach high frequency words the way the brain actually learns them.
