Part 2 of 4: How Many of Peter’s “200,000 Wrongly Spelled Words” Do Grade 1 Kids Actually Encounter?

 

Peter’s thread paints English spelling as chaotic — with “200,000 phono-illogical errors” supposedly blocking children from learning to read. But how many of those words does a Grade 1 child actually face?

 

The Reality in Grade 1

By the end of Grade 1, most children read simple books containing just 300–500 unique words. These are mostly high-frequency and basic decodable words like:

 

“cat,” “dog,” “run,” “big,” “jump.”

 

The truly irregular words — those that defy phonics even after advanced rules — are very few at this stage.

 

Enter the Dolch 220

The Dolch sight word list covers 50–80% of words in early texts. Let’s break it down:

 

20–30 words are permanently irregular (e.g., the, one, said, was, of, come, they, does).

 

70–75 words are temporarily tricky but become regular once common patterns are taught (e.g., out, down, look).

 

100+ words are fully decodable with basic Grade 1 phonics (e.g., can, it, get, up).

 

In my book Teach Your Child to Read, I recommend rote memorisation of the full Dolch list early on. Once these 220 words are memorised as whole units:

 

The truly irregular ones are handled effortlessly.

 

The temporarily tricky ones become regular as phonics knowledge grows.

 

So What Happens to Peter’s 200,000?

Out of Peter’s claimed “200,000 wrongly spelled words,” a Grade 1 child encounters perhaps 20–50 that need special attention — and rote memorisation of Dolch words covers nearly all of them.

 

If irregular spelling were the primary barrier, children who’ve memorised their sight words should be reading fluently by the end of Grade 1. Yet many are not.

 

The Real Barrier: Mis-Taught Sounds

The real reason most struggling Grade 1 readers can’t decode even regular words like bat, sit, or pen is this:

 

Stop consonants are taught with an added schwa sound: “buh”, “tuh”, “kuh”.

 

This turns bat into buh-ah-tuh — which cannot possibly blend into the known spoken word bat. Confusion sets in. Blending fails. Logical children disengage.

 

Final Thought

Yes, English spelling is complex. But Grade 1 reading involves only a tiny, manageable corner of that complexity. With:

 

Rote memorisation of high-frequency words, and

 

Precise, clean sound teaching,

 

…the vast majority of children can read fluently long before facing the dictionary’s 200,000 irregularities.