Teachers and parents can help young readers practice sight words with the help of word lists, as well as free flash cards, from two FreePrintable.net websites.

TeachersPrintables.net, which has more than 243 classroom printables, recently added a category for sight words. It includes 16 lists of sight words, in categories such as High Frequency Words, Dolch Words, and Fry's Sight Words.

"Because there are several ways that educators approach sight words with developing readers, I wanted to be sure to offer an array of variations for teachers and parents to choose from," explain Kevin Savetz, the sites' creator.

Also, TeachersPrintables.net has a new "sister site," PrintableFlashCards.net, where the sight words have been conveniently converted to flash cards for easy practice.

Sight words are words that educators have determined children are developmentally ready to learn by sight. In many cases, these words don't follow the typical "rules" of phonics. The lists match the English words that are seen in "high frequency" in educational story books written for students at each corresponding grade level.

Edward William Dolch, Ph.D, was the first mainstream educator to develop lists of common sight words to know, by grade level, back in the 1930s. Besides Dolch word lists, TeachersPrintables.net and PrintableFlashCards.net has Fry's word lists, high-frequency word lists and other lists. (In the 1990s, Edward Fry, Ph.D, expanded on Dolch's original 220 words and took to concept to 1,000 words, reordering and supplementing some of the lists along the way.)

The flash cards at PrintablesFlashCards.net are free to print, and are formatted to be cut along the dashed lines and folded along the solid lines, creating easy-to-read flash cards for home or school.

"With the help of these lists and flash cards, plus practice, children will be well on their way to recognizing these important sight words automatically," Savetz said.

There are nearly 80 sites in the FreePrintable.net family of free printables sites created by Savetz Publishing, Inc., a company devoted to creating useful and informative web sites of interest to consumers and small businesses.