👀 Jack's Sight Words

The twenty most common English words on twenty big cards — tap one and hear it read out

What this is

Some English words cannot be sounded out. Said is not s-a-i-d, was is not w-a-s, and the helps nobody who tries. Year 1 calls them sight words: you learn them by seeing them, not by decoding them, and once they are in place a page of a first reading book is suddenly mostly words you already know.

This is that list, on cards. The twenty are the top of the DfE "first 100 high frequency words" — the order schools in England actually use — so the small number in the corner of each card is its rank, and card 1 is the word he will meet most often of all:

the · and · a · to · said · in · he · I · of · it · was · you · they · on · she · is · for · at · his · but

Tap a card and the word is read out in the same neural English voice the other games use. The card lights up yellow, keeps a ✓, and counts towards the twenty stars in the corner. Nothing is ever locked, nothing is ever wrong: he can tap the same word forty times if he likes it.

🎮 How to play

👆   Tap a word to hear it

The card flashes yellow, the word is spoken, and a ✓ says he has read it. Twenty ticks and the whole screen celebrates: "You can read all twenty words!"

🔊   Read all

Walks the list from the top, lighting each card as it says it, with a breath in between. Tap anything to stop it.

🎲   Mix

Shuffles the cards. Children are very good at learning "the one in the top left corner" instead of the word, and this takes that away. Tap again to put them back in order.

⭐   Quiz

Ten rounds. "Find the word: said." Tap the right card and it lights up with confetti; tap a wrong one and it just wobbles and says "try again" — the round stays open until he gets it.

🎯 What it practises

• 👀   Recognising the twenty words that make up a large share of every early reading book
• 👂   Hearing each one said properly in English, as often as he wants
• 🧠   Word, not position — "Mix" makes sure the grid cannot be memorised instead

⚙️ How it works

Twenty <button> cards in a CSS grid: four across on a tablet, three on a phone, in Andika so the a and the g are shaped the way school writes them. Which words have been read is a comma-separated list in localStorage (jackSightRead), so the ticks survive closing the tab.

The voice is not the browser's. Web Speech sounds like a computer on an iPhone, which Jack noticed straight away, so every line — all twenty words and every prompt — is pre-rendered as a small MP3 with Microsoft's neural en-GB-SoniaNeural voice and played back through Web Audio. The page fetches a manifest of text -> file at load; anything not in it falls back to speechSynthesis, so the game never goes silent. The AudioContext is created inside the ▶ tap, because iOS refuses to start audio any other way.

🎈 The other games

Game	What it is
📖 Jack's Words	Hear a word, build it from letter tiles, then read it in a sentence	▶ play
🥅 Jack's Match	Tell real words from decodable nonsense words, then spell by ear	▶ play
✏️ Jack's Letters	Finger-trace all 26 lowercase letters in the correct stroke order	▶ play
🔢 Jack's Numbers	Count, add and subtract with footballs — to 10, then to 20	▶ play
💯 Jack's Big Numbers	Tens and ones, adding and taking away all the way to 100	▶ play
🍎 Jack's Apples	Trace 1–20, then fill the missing numbers into the apple grid	▶ play
👀 Jack's Sight Words	The twenty most common English words on big cards — tap one and hear it read out	▶ play 👈 this one
♟️ Jackies Schach	Full FIDE rules with a coach that marks the safe squares (German)	▶ play

All eight on one start page: jackbenn.ing — homework games first, chess always last.

🛠 Built like this

Every game in this organisation is one self-contained index.html — no build step, no framework, no package manager, no analytics, and no network calls once the page and its clips have loaded. That is a deliberate constraint: a game a child depends on should still work in five years, and a parent should be able to read the whole thing in one sitting.

• Speech — pre-rendered neural clips through Web Audio, with the Web Speech API as the fallback. It always waits for a tap first, because Chrome and iOS block audio without user activation.
• Progress — kept in localStorage on the device. Nothing is collected, sent or stored anywhere else.
• Made for an iPad mini in either orientation: finger-sized targets, no hover-only interactions, prefers-reduced-motion respected.

Run it locally:

python3 -m http.server 8000

The start page at jackbenn.ing is built from google814/Jack, which is the source of truth. The repos in this organisation are copies kept in step by tools/sync-game-repos.sh in that repo, so each game also has its own page and its own link.