The term literacy refers generally to a person’s ability to read and write. (Though literacy is also used more broadly for describing critical knowledge and productive ability in other things, such as financial literacy, media literacy, and cultural literacy, in this Teacher’s Corner, we’ll refer to reading and writing skills).

In the introduction for this month’s Teacher’s Corner, we defined phonemic awareness as a student’s ability to understand that words are made up of sounds. Phonics was described as understanding the relationship between sounds in a word and the letters used to spell it. This week in the Teacher’s Corner, we will present an easy daily activity that can help beginners develop skills in both of these foundational areas of early literacy.

Texts written in English are made up of many of the same words. These words are called high-frequency words because they appear so often. Sometimes these words can be tricky for beginners because their spelling patterns may not follow typical English phonics rules. Sometimes these words are also referred to as Dolch words, after Edward William Dolch, who compiled a list of English high-frequency words.