Grade 1 National Reading Vocabulary by Tampa Reads

Grade 1 National Reading Vocabulary

With additions and comments by Don McCabe Director of the AVKO Educational Research Foundation. We hope his comments and additions may prove helpful to those teachers who believe that it is more economical to teach decoding using onsets & rimes than to just teach single words by sight or by phonic rules without a lot of examples.

The 340 reading vocabulary words in this 1st Grade list have been carefully selected as words which students need to master by the end of Grade 1. Students who achieve this goal will be reading slightly above grade level and typically score in the top 25% on national reading tests (such as the Stanford Achievement Test – SAT).

The 340 words introduced in the 1st Grade List
are arranged as follows:

1st nine weeks - 70 words With AVKO additions 333
2nd nine weeks - 90 words With AVKO additions 438
3rd nine weeks - 90 words
4th nine weeks - 90 words
TOTAL = 340 words in 36 weeks
AVKO's Total = 771 words in 18 weeks!

The first nine weeks begins with a two week review of all consonant sounds which should have been memorized during Kindergarten. It is extremely important that all students have completely memorized the consonant sounds before beginning the vocabulary words. This insures students have the "foundation skills" necessary for efficient learning of the Grade 1 reading words.

AVKO Note: This is intended for classrooms of 20 to 30 students. As you know your child, the review may not even take a day. Even if your child doesn't know all the consonant sounds, you can make notes of which you will need to make sure he learns.

The words used in our Grade 1 Vocabulary List have been carefully selected as the high frequency words typically used in 1st Grade reading books and Grade 1 standardized tests. When you begin the support materials in our TampaRead’s Grade 1 Program (which parallel these vocabulary words), it is essential for your students to have mastered the consonant sounds for letters – b – c – d – f – g – h – j – k – l – m – n – p – q – r – s – t – v – w – x – y – z. We stress again that failure to memorize these sounds will result in students learning at a much slower rate.

The vocabulary words are arranged from the "most common" in the beginning weeks to the "lesser common" words toward the end of the year. This provides you the most logical and efficient order for instruction throughout the year. To further increase memorization efficiency we have organized words into similar vowel sound and reading-rule categories. This strategy alone dramatically increases the rate in which a student learns new words by providing an “easy to remember” common sound or rule to use while decoding the words.

After working with hundreds of students over the past 15 years, we have confirmed that students who can read these 340 words by the end of their Grade 1 year will be reading at approximately a 2.0 Grade Level and typically score in the top 25% on First Grade standardized tests (i.e. S.A.T.). If you would like to view the vocabulary building worksheets and additional materials we’ve developed to assist in memorization of these Grade 1 reading words– please view our Grade 1 Reading Package at - http://www.tampareads.com/order/grade1/select1.htm if you are not currently a TampaReads/ReadingKey member.

Happy Reading….

Richard Pressinger (M.Ed.) Reading Specialist ReadingKey.com

Important “Difficult” Vocabulary Words

The last word in each daily list is what we call our “Word of the Day.” It has been printed in blue or red to make it “stand out” from the other phonics based reading words. The “Word of the Day” is far more difficult to learn than the other words in the column. This difficulty occurs because it is either visually similar to other words (i.e. went – want) or is not consistent with typical phonics rules (i.e. does-duz – what-wut). The “Word of the Day” must be given much more practice to insure its memorization.