Fry Sight Words Teaching Resources

Help students quickly learn the words on the Fry Sight Words list with printable worksheets, activities, task cards, digital literacy centers and more teacher-created literacy resources for kindergarten, first-grade, second-grade, and third-grade readers.

This collection includes sight word games and flashcards, Google Interactive activities, reading center activities and more curriculum-aligned teaching resources that have undergone rigorous review by our expert teacher team to ensure they're ready for your readers!

Want to learn more about the Fry sight words list and the man behind them? Read on for a primer from our teacher team!

What Are Fry Sight Words?

The Fry Sight Word List is a list of high-frequency words developed by Dr. Edward Fry in the 1990s that's used in early literacy education in schools here in the US and around the world.

The list was designed to give students a strong foundation in high-frequency words that would allow them to read and comprehend a wide variety of texts.

How Many Fry Sight Words Are There?

The Fry list is massive with 1,000 words that are commonly used in English, arranged in order of frequency of use.

The list is divided into 10 different categories, with the first 100 words being the most frequently used words in English and each of the other categories including 100 other words. Each level or category builds on the previous one, so students typically learn the words in order.

The categories are broken out as follows:

1. First 100 — The first level, this category is typically covered in kindergarten or first-grade.
2. Second 100
3. Third 100
4. Fourth 100
5. Fifth 100
6. Sixth 100
7. Seventh 100
8. Eighth 100
9. Ninth 100
10. Tenth 100

Who Was Edward Fry?

His name is famous in early literacy education, but who was Edward Fry, and why do we use his list to teach sight words?

Fry was an educator and author best known for his work in the field of literacy education. Born in 1925 and raised in Iowa, he earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Iowa and went on to earn a Ph.D. from Rutgers University in New Jersey.

In his work, Fry focused on developing effective methods for teaching reading and writing to students of all ages. He focused particularly on the role of phonics instruction in reading development, writing several books and research papers on the subject.

Along with his sight word list, Fry is perhaps best known for developing the Fry Readability Graph, a tool for evaluating the difficulty level of a given text. The graph considers the average sentence length and the number of syllables per word in a text, and it's typically used to determine the grade level at which the text is most appropriate.