Let's Talk about Heart Words...

What are Heart words? 

In the Little Learners decodable books, there are a few high-frequency words that children cannot decode yet. We call these ‘Heart words’ because children need to learn them by heart to read them. Many Heart words become decodable later in the program when children have more knowledge of the alphabetic code. A few Heart words will not become decodable – they are irregular or use uncommon phoneme–grapheme correspondences.

 Why do we teach Heart words? 

Heart words are a combination of high-frequency words and interest words that are needed to create a story. At Stages 1 and 2, the Heart words the and I allow children to read and write whole sentences and stories. 

What Heart words do we learn in each stage? 

Stages 1 and 2: my My the The I. These are high-frequency words that children need to learn by heart to read automatically in the decodable books. However, you can point out the parts of the word they may already know, for example the /m/ in my and My. The important part of the word the is teaching the articulation of /th/ – where the tongue pokes out between teeth. We include Heart words with and without capitals for the earlier stages, to help children become familiar with how the words look. 

 Stage 3: he she we to do was. Follow the same teaching approach as in Stages 1 and 2 when teaching these Heart words. At this stage, children are building up a bank of words that they can recognise automatically. 

Stage 4: her of are too for see. Children will be familiar with the concept of Heart words and the difference in approach to reading an unknown decodable word. Practice and success leading to mastery is the key. 

The word a is introduced in Stage Plus 4. This is the first time that children will have read the word a. To avoid confusion, we recommend teaching children to pronounce it as /ā/ as in apron. This is to address a common problem encountered by beginning readers – the confusion of introducing the letter ‘a’ representing /a/ inside words but representing /u/ when it is a word in a sentence (I can see a hat.). 

From Stage Plus 4 on, the accompanying Heart word posters group words according to their phonemes. For example, say, day, play, plays and cake share the /ā/ phoneme and are grouped on the Plus 4 poster. 

Stages 5 and 6 introduce interest words such as firemen, birthday, elephant, love, happy and zoo. They are words that are a little more complex and some children will need more reading practice to learn them. 

By Stage 7 the number of new Heart words reduces dramatically as children have already learnt many common high-frequency words. Some Stage 7 Heart words become decodable as children move through the Stage 7 focus, for example, green and why. 

For further information on heart words including how to support the learning of them at home and how they link to the science of learning visit 3 Tips for Teaching Your Child Heart Words (Sight Words) | Science of Reading | Tips for Parents (youtube.com)