What are HEART WORDS?
Science now tells us that we need to integrate high frequency “sight words” into our phonics lessons. Students use their phoneme knowledge to map the regular part of the words, then only have to “learn by heart” the sounds that are irregular in the word, thus the name Heart Words.
High-Frequency Words that are irregularly spelled are called “Heart Words” because some part of the word must be explicitly taught and “learned by heart”. Students will encounter these words often so they need to be able to read and spell them automatically. Examples of Heart Words include said, are, do, and where.