Teaching high-frequency words and phonics – two conflicting approaches?

Wouldn’t it be great if we could teach those high-frequency words strictly within the phonic progression of our programme? We would teach ‘the’ when we got to teaching the digraph ‘th’, and the children would decode the word easily. Sadly, we can’t wait that long: children come across ‘the’ when reading the simplest of texts (even decodable ones). They immediately realise that they cannot decode it.

To address this problem, teachers often offer children lists of non-decodable high-frequency words to learn at home. Is this not an approach that conflicts with synthetic phonics teaching, though? One approach says ‘sound out the word when you read and spell’, and the other says ‘learn the whole word by shape because it’s too tricky!’ How can we teach two conflicting approaches without confusing our pupils?

I find that even quite difficult high-frequency words like ‘there’ can be taught, as long as we talk about them in the same way as decodable words and use the same strategies: segmenting and blending. So, for example, when a child reads ‘the’ for the first time, the teacher can help by pointing to ‘th’ and then ‘e’ while saying the sounds, blending them for the pupil. The teacher does the same when the child comes across ‘there’, this time saying the sounds and pointing to ‘th’ and ‘ere’.

Soon, other high-frequency words like ‘where’ get the same treatment. The child begins to see a pattern: both those words have a grapheme that spells ‘air’. This all fits in later, when they reach Phase 5 of ‘Letters and Sounds’ and are taught alternative spellings for vowel sounds.

So, we’re not asking the children to read some common words only by shape. We’re breaking the words into phonemes and they eventually slot into the larger picture of our rather complex, but teachable, phonic code. In this way, we demystify those ‘tricky’ inaccessible words that the pupil cannot (yet) decode.