How do your stories match with lists such as Fry's most frequent words list?
Many teachers are familiar with Fry's list of the 1000 most frequently used words in the English language. Read Naturally passages are made up of a high percentage of these words. For example, 96 percent of the words that make up the stories in level 1.0 are on the 1000 most frequent words list.
At the same time, Read Naturally believes that it is important to continually challenge students. Therefore, as the Read Naturally levels get higher, so do the number of words that do not appear on the most frequent words list. The highest Read Naturally levels are made up of around 87 to 89 percent of the words on the most frequent words list.
These numbers dip from the 96 percent correlation of the lower levels, but appropriately so-as students are able to read in the higher levels, they are generally more knowledgeable with most of the 1000 frequent words and need to learn language that is much richer and more powerful. We want to continue to increasingly challenge students to grow and to expand their vocabulary in these higher levels. Therefore, Read Naturally passages provide a good balance of the most frequent words and less frequent words for students to practice.
Also keep in mind that because the Read Naturally stories are nonfiction, a number of the words that do not appear on Fry's list of 1000 most frequently used words list are the proper names of famous people and places.