First Grade Cloze Activities for Dolch High-Frequency Words

Free Printable Worksheets for Grade 1 Dolch Words

Dolch high-frequency words represent 220 words that make up between 50 and 75 percent of all print in English. These words are foundational for reading, and explicit teaching is essential since many of them are irregular, and cannot be decoded with regular rules of English phonics.

Depending on your school district's policy, you will find that Dolch is generally considered the best set of high-frequency words. There is also the Fleish-Kincaid list, which is aligned to an evaluation form for those sight words.

The first-grade words follow the pre-primer and primer words, but these activities are intended to follow mastery of the previous two lists. When creating these worksheets, the primer and pre-primer words were used as well as the first-grade words with a few easily decodable words.

These sentences have blanks for students to write the correct word. The worksheets also use each sentence across three or four worksheets with different C loze choice.

Instructional Strategies

These worksheets are only part of helping your students acquire this important vocabulary.  You will want to shape the instructional strategies to your student's communication and fine motor skills (often they hate to hold a pencil). Wherever your students are developmentally and in terms of age will impact how you use these strategies.  If your student is significantly delayed, you want to be sure you use age-appropriate themes for your writing:  favorite music groups, etc. You may also want to print pictures of student's favorite rock groups, sports stars or animals as the prompt for their writing.

Here are some suggestions:

• Create sentences together with a pocket chart. Print out the free printable flash cards, create lots of extra cards, and have your students dictate. It will provide your students with practice.
• Read primer level books together.  Your reading series will have a decodable book you can print out, and have students highlight high-frequency words you have put on the word wall. Reading A-Z offers a wide range of books to support instruction:  you can even search by sight words. When you find the words you are working on, you can design small group instruction around the books.
• For writing practice, provide templates that offer opportunities to use the new words.  Perhaps you can create a writing page with the sight vocabulary you are working on, and place those words in a word bank, telling the students that they must use 3 of the 5 words, or you can always generate writing by starting out with a model or a suggestion. Often with emerging writers, your goal is to get the pencil on the paper.  Modeling, or writing together, is the first step. Providing sentence models, perhaps on sentence strips, is the next step. Finally, encouraging students to use the word wall and expand their writing from one sentence to three or four, will be the last steps. 

Dolch First Grade Cloze Worksheet 1

Dolch First Grade Cloze Worksheet 2

Dolch First Grade Cloze Worksheet 3

Dolch First Grade Cloze Worksheet 4

Dolch First Grade Cloze Worksheet 5

Dolch First Grade Cloze Worksheet 6

Dolch First Grade Cloze Worksheet 7

Dolch First Grade Cloze Worksheet 8

Dolch First Grade Cloze Worksheet 9

Dolch First Grade Cloze Worksheet 10

Dolch First Grade Cloze Worksheet 11

Dolch First Grade Cloze Worksheet 12