Inquiry Project: High Frequency Words.

What are high frequency words? They are words that appear the most often in texts. They represent approximately one hundered of the most commonly used words in the english language. High frequency words are taught in preschool and in kindergarten through repition and then memorization. High frequency words are often also know as sight words because these words need to be recognized in a blink of an eye. It is very difficult to teach children these words because they are very abstract and have no visual cues to help. The tend to be the most difficult words to know on beginning reader, that is why it is so important to teach young students these words. Knowing these words will benefit an early reader in the sense that they can focus on the other words in the text and their meaning because they have already learned to memorize the high frequency words. Also, knowing high frequency words help build confidence and self-esteem in students to read better and develop decoding skills. These words appear over and over in a text and can therefore help affect the meaning of a sentence to make it more understandable to beginning readers. Anything that can provide confidence and build self-esteem in my students to read, will greatly affect their ability to learn and decode words that they may not know. That is why learning these high frequecny words early on in a childs developmental stage will help them in the long run. Some interesting facts that I found while researching high frequency words were that The is the most commonly used word in the english language, along with the, I & and account for ten percent of the the words printed. There are approximately one hundered words that make up fifty percent of the words that we read.
What are some examples of high frequency words? There are a lot of websites out there devoted to sets and pages of listing high frequency words. some of the websites included,school.elps.k12.mi.us/donley/.../sitton_word_list.htm, and www.eyeonthesky.org/pdfs/HighFrequencyWords.pdf.
These websites provides some examples of high frequency words so i will also include a small example of some, The, of, and. a. to , is, in, you, that, he, for, was, on, are, as, with, his, they, at, he, ect... the list goes on and on, and just gets into even more words as you get higher into grade levels. 
What are some ways to teach high frequency words?
Well I thought it would be fun to learn some interactive games that can help children learn and memorize these words. There are tons of flashcard games that can be played and in my presentation we played the game roll, say, keep. You can make the board by using poster and just divide the board into sections having 6 sections (3 on one side, and 3 on the other) you can draw out dice or number the squares one through six. Then place notecards/flashcards of high frequency words face down and have a small group of student (3-4 students). The each take a turn to roll the dice and and pick the card number that the dice rolled. Then they say the word on that card, ( if the dont know the word, they place the card down and pace the dice to the next student) if the say the word correctly they keep the card and the teacher will replace the empty space with a new high frequency word card. Once all the cards have been played you tell the students to add up their number of cards and can reward each students for doing their best. I learned this game from my mother-in-law who teaches kindergarten and I though it was a great fun interactive game that wasn't limited to high frequency words, its whatever you could place on an index card, so they can review colors, shapes, adding, subtracting, ect. Its a fun versitile game that students will never get tired of. I actually used this when I taught a private prek class in Georgia, and the students absolutely enjoyed it, they wanted to review their sight words and play the game everyday to see how many cards they could get. I as there teacher saw a change in how many words they knew from the beginning to the end and it was great to seem them sound out the words and just know it through memorization. There are also websites that give great interactive games, for example. www.theschoolbell.com/Links/Dolch/Dolch.html.
Overall, I learned a lot about what high frequency words are and different ways to implement them into the classroom. I can't wait for other future teachers to gain the knowlegde I recieved from learning about high frequuency words and utitlizing the imformation available to them from current teacher, past teachers, mentor teacher, classes, and internet websites.