What are 'Heart Words'?

Introduction

It was the start of my first year teaching infants, I was reading through the support plans for my class and they were full of the mention of 'Dolch words'. I had a vague idea of what these were, but they weren't something I'd thought much about before. It hadn't really come up during my PME training or time on placement, and it definitely wasn't on my radar from teaching 6th class, but I was generally aware of the concept of children in younger class learning off words. Dolch words, tricky words, high-frequency words...chances are you've heard of at least one!

As far as teaching children to learn off these words went, it seemed to me that it was mainly displaying the words in the classroom, memorising them and sending home word lists for homework. It wasn't until I opened up my UFLI manual for the first time that I realised there was so much more to it than that. This was the first time I'd come across 'Heart Words'.

What are 'Heart Words'?

I often feel calling them 'Heart Words' isn't quite right. Heart words is more of an approach or method for teaching high-frequency words. These words can be regularly or irregularly spelled and they're the words that you find on lists like Dolch or Fry.

Most of these irregular words actually only have one or two 'parts' that need to be learned off, while the remaining parts are decodable. So instead of children memorising a whole word, they only need to learn off part of the word 'by heart'.

Let's look at the word the irregular word 'you'. It has two phonemes /y/ /oo/.

The letter 'y; is making the /y/ sound that we expect it to make. However we'd expect 'ou' to make an /ow/ sound (e.g.out, mouse, found), but in this word it's making an /oo/ sound. That's what makes this an irregular word.

So what do we do?

We learn that part off by heart! Provided children have learned the /y/ sound, they now only need to remember that in this case the /oo/ sound is represented by ou. They don't need to memorise the whole word.

Ok, let's look at a temporarily irregular word next. The word 'the'. It also has two phonemes /th/ /e/.

The letter 'e' is making the /e/ sound we'd expect. The letters 'th' are also making one of the sounds we'd expect this diagraph to make. However, depending on your scope and sequence, children generally don't learn the 'th' sound until they've at least covered all the initial alphabet sounds. This means that it could be the end of Junior Infants or beginning of Senior Infants until they learn to decode this word. That's a problem because this word is everywhere!

So what do we do?

We learn the 'th' part off by heart for now! That way we can read the word 'the' early in Junior Infants. Then when we do learn the 'th' sound the word won't be irregular anymore. We'll no longer need to have the word memorised because we'll be able to decode it now!

How do I know what high-frequency words to teach?

Look at your phonics programme first. UFLI has high-frequency word instruction (using the heart word method) built into it's lessons so you just need to follow that scope and sequence. Jolly phonics also has tricky word lists that line up with the words children will need to know for their different colour readers.

I'd exercise caution with just following Dolch or Fry list words. List 1 of the Dolch list includes words that Junior Infants would quickly learn to decode such as in, it, on and had.

So how do I practically teach words using the 'Heart Word' approach?

1. Introduce the word: Display it, read it, have children read it.

2. Break down the word: Count the sounds in it, underline the sounds. Which sounds do we know? Which sounds do we need to learn by heart?

3. Spell the word: Count the sounds in it, drawn elkonin box or line to represent each sound, have the children call out each sound they hear, draw heart under the sound they need to learn off by heart.

4. Sky-writing: Wipe the word away, children sky write it from memory saying letter names out loud

5. Mini-whiteboards*: Children try spelling word independently, they draw a heart under the irregular part of the word

*Magnetic letters also work as a nice substitute for mini-whiteboards!