Primary 2 spelling words: common words

Primary 2 · 26 words · Updated 2026-09-17

1. about
2. after
3. again
4. because
5. before
6. could
7. every
8. first
9. found
10. great
11. little
12. might
13. never
14. other
15. people
16. place
17. right
18. should
19. small
20. sound
21. still
22. their
23. think
24. three
25. under
26. where

How to practise these words

By Primary 2 a child can hear most of a word and write something close to it, so the work here is on the letters that are not pronounced the way they look. Group the awkward ones together and practise them as a family: "could", "should" and "might" all hide letters, and learning them side by side is easier than meeting them one at a time. Ask your child to write the word, then read their own attempt back aloud and say what does not match. Two or three of the difficult words plus a handful of easy ones makes a session short enough to finish. Keep "their" and "where" for a day when your child is fresh, because both are usually the last to stick.

Where these words come from

These sit in the second and third hundred of the Fry frequency list, the words that carry ordinary writing once the first hundred are known. None of them is taken from a school's own spelling programme.