What Heart Words Actually Are
Heart Words is a method for teaching sight words that most elementary reading programs rely on but handle poorly. The idea is straightforward: take common high-frequency words and identify which parts are phonetically regular and which parts need to be memorized as irregular chunks. You teach kids to sound out the regular parts and "catch" the irregular part with their heart. It's not a brand new concept, but it's been formalized recently enough that you'll see it popping up in lesson plans and teacher supply catalogs everywhere. I first ran into this when a parent brought me a copy of a phonics workbook that listed words like "said" and told her child to just memorize the whole thing. That word is 60% phonetic. The /s/ and the /d/ are dead simple. Only the /e/ // mapping needs attention. Telling a kid who just learned the short-e sound to memorize the entire word wastes time and creates confusion.
Science Of Reading Heart Words
The Science Of Reading Heart Words approach breaks words down into. For each target word, you mark the graphemes that follow standard phonics rules and isolate the one or two that don't. The child learns to blend through the regular portions and then applies the irregular portion as a single unit. It's essentially structured phonics with a small sight-word safety net built in. Here's the breakdown for a few common examples:
- the — /th/ is regular (digraph), /e/ is the irregular chunk that can map to either /i/ or /ð/ depending on context. Teach the children to notice the vowel sound shifts.
- said — /s/ and /d/ are regular. /ai/ is the irregular part that says //. Mark it, highlight it, drill it once.
- was — /w/ and /s/ are regular. /a/ saying // is the irregular portion. One mapping to memorize.
- were — /w/ and /r/ are regular. /er/ says /r/. Irregular vowel team.
The methodology takes about 30 seconds per word once you're familiar with the process. The real value shows up in cumulative effect. Most of the Dolch and Fry lists fall into this category — roughly 70% of the top 100 sight words have at least one phonetically regular component. That's a huge chunk of early reading that traditional whole-word memorization treats as completely opaque. I use a three-step routine that I've refined over about five years of pulling kids out of reading interventions. First, write the word on the board. Second, have the student underline the phonetic parts and circle the irregular part — or I do it with them. Third, we blend it together saying each sound, pausing slightly before the circled portion so the child hears the shift in the pattern. The blending step is where most people mess it up. They say the word too fast and the child doesn't actually experience the irregular mapping. You have to slow it down. Say it like this: /s/ /e/ /d/ — wait — // — /s/ /e/ /d/ — said. The deliberate pause around the irregular chunk is what makes the method work. Without it, you're just drilling memorization with extra steps.
Get the Full Details
I also found that this works differently depending on the child's existing phonics knowledge. A student who already knows digraphs will pick up "the" faster because /th/ is a known unit. A student who is still solidifying individual phoneme-grapheme correspondences might struggle with "the" because they haven't internalized the digraph yet. In that case, you teach the digraph separately first, then come back to the Heart Words routine.
Where This Method Falls Apart
Heart Words isn't a silver bullet. There are words where nearly every grapheme is irregular, and the method stops being useful. "A" is one. "Of" is another — /v/ or /v/ with no phonetic structure to leverage. "One" has the /w/ that isn't spelled, the /n/ that's regular, and the silent /e/. These don't benefit much from the Heart Words treatment. You're better off teaching those as true sight words with repetition, or breaking them down using morphological awareness if they're long enough to have meaningful parts. Another limitation is time. If you're working with a whole class of twenty-five first graders and you want to cover the entire Fry first hundred, this method adds roughly two to three minutes per word compared to flashcard drilling. For a remediation session with one or two students, that extra time is worth it because the child builds phonetic awareness alongside sight recognition. For a group setting where speed matters more than depth, you might skip the Heart Words breakdown on words with mostly regular patterns and just use quick exposure. The biggest mistake I see teachers make is over-applying the method to words that are already largely phonetic. "Cat," "map," "stop" — these don't need the Heart Words treatment. They're fully decodable. Spending ten minutes on "the" with a child who already reads at a second-grade level is a waste. Use diagnostic assessment to figure out which words the child actually can't decode, and only apply Heart Words to those. Don't teach everything this way just because the materials tell you to.
There's also the issue of dialect and pronunciation variation. The /a/ in "was" sounds different in many regional accents. In some Southern American English varieties, "was" and "wus" are close enough that the irregular mapping the method teaches doesn't match what the child hears at home. This isn't a flaw in the method itself, but it's something to be aware of. If the child's home dialect shifts the pronunciation of the target word, you may need to adjust which portion you mark as irregular or supplement with oral language work before the print connection lands.
What You Need
You don't need anything fancy. Whiteboard or chart paper, markers, a list of high-frequency words organized by frequency rank, and about fifteen minutes per session if you're working with a small group. I keep a laminated reference sheet of the top two hundred Fry words with the irregular portions already marked, but making your own takes about an hour and you'll remember the patterns better. There are free downloadable Heart Word flashcards available from a few educational sites if you don't want to create them yourself. Search for "Heart Words flashcards free" and you'll find several teacher-contributed resources on TPT and other shared repositories. The quality varies, so check that the irregular portions are actually marked correctly before you hand them to a child.
