Fry's research shows how important sight word mastery is! The first 100 Fry words are found in 50% of our printed language. If your students know the first 100 words, then in theory, that means that they already know about 50% of the words they will read in school! Wow, that is some powerful info! The first 100 Fry words are recommended to be memorized by the end of first grade. Unlike Dolch words, Fry words are any part of speech and based purely on the most commonly found words in published writing. Fry's research is also much more recent than Dolch's research. The debate between these two lists will be saved for another post. :) Many of these HFW (High Frequency Words) words don't follow our phonics rules, so they need to be memorized (sight words). For example, look at the HFW "have". It does not follow the rules of the "-ave" word family (gave, pave, Dave). If a student tried to sound it out, they would see the vowel-consanant-e (silent e,