Year 3–4
The hundred words the national curriculum names for years 3 and 4
accidentactualaddress
Start Show moreFree spelling tests, ready to take
For the evening the school list has not come home. Every list here is a sitting you can start now — spoken, marked and added to the same practice schedule as your own words.
Ready-made lists
Common exception words
The words years 1 and 2 must spell that cannot be sounded out
theado
Start Show moreCommonly misspelled
The words that go wrong most often, grouped by why they are hard
separatedefinitelydesperate
Start Show moreWord families
Endings a group of words share, so one word teaches the rest
cathatflat
Start Show moreDolch sight words
The 220 service words and 95 nouns Edward Dolch identified in 1936
aandaway
Start Show moreFry sight words
The first 300 of Edward Fry’s Instant Words, in frequency order
theofand
Start Show moreGrade 1
Short vowels, consonant digraphs and beginning blends
cathatmap
Start Show moreGrade 2
Silent e, vowel teams, inflected endings and contractions
cakenamegate
Start Show moreGrade 3
R-controlled vowels, soft c and g, prefixes, suffixes and homophones
farmstartsharp
Start Show moreGrade 4
Multisyllabic words, -tion endings, Latin roots and irregular plurals
actionstationmotion
Start Show moreGrade 5
Greek and Latin roots, the schwa, and confusable word pairs
telephonetelescopephotograph
Start Show moreGrade 6
Advanced suffixes, academic vocabulary and commonly confused pairs
specialofficialfinancial
Start Show moreWhat is in here, and where each list came from
Two different kinds of thing sit on this page, and the difference is worth knowing before you pick one. Dolch and Fry are published research lists: word counts done in 1936 and in the 1950s respectively, reproduced here in their original groupings rather than tidied up. If you were sent to find "the Dolch first grade words", these are the forty-one Edward Dolch put in that group, unedited.
The graded lists are ours and do not pretend otherwise. No country issues an official spelling list — spelling sits inside language-arts standards as patterns to be taught, not as a set of words to be memorised — so every "fourth grade spelling list" anywhere on the internet is somebody’s compilation. Ours is built the way a scope and sequence is built: eight units per year, each unit one pattern, ten words that all show it.
Picking a level without guessing
Start a grade below where you think the child is and move up when a whole unit comes back clean. A list that produces eleven out of twelve is doing very little; one that produces four out of twelve teaches mostly that spelling is unpleasant. The useful place is around seven or eight, which is where the words in the queue outnumber the ones already known without swamping them.
Units are short on purpose. Ten words sharing one pattern is a single idea — the silent e, the soft c, the -tion ending — and a child who can spell the ten can usually spell the hundred others built the same way. Ten unrelated hard words teach ten unrelated hard words.
Using one of these next to your own list
The school list is the one that gets tested on Friday, so it is the one that should be typed in. These lists are for the other four evenings: something to practise when the list has not arrived yet, when it has already been learnt by Wednesday, or over a holiday when there is no list at all.
Words from both sources share one queue. If because turns up in your own list on Monday and in a graded unit on Thursday, it is the same word to the schedule — answered right twice, it moves along; missed once, it goes back to the start regardless of which list it came from.
Common questions
Are these lists the same as my school’s?
Almost certainly not, and they are not meant to be. Schools choose their own words. Use these as practice material and type the actual list in when it arrives; the words your child is being tested on are the words worth scheduling.
Which list suits a seven-year-old?
Second grade is the usual fit, with the Dolch first-grade and second-grade groups running alongside it. Sight words and pattern words do different jobs — one covers the words that cannot be sounded out, the other covers the ones that can — and most seven-year-olds need both.
Can I take a list without doing the whole thing?
Yes. Every list is split into short units and you start a unit rather than a list, so a sitting is ten or twelve words. Nothing needs to be finished in one go, and stopping halfway still records the words that were answered.
Do the built-in words have sentences?
Every one of them. The sentence is read after the word, and for homophones it is what makes the question answerable at all — there is no way to spell `their` correctly from the sound alone.