Heart Words are common words that aren’t decodable for the reader, they have parts that need to be learned ‘off by heart’. 

Many Heart Words are not decodable temporarily because at some point during the Little Learners teaching sequence they'll become decodable. Other Heart Words are not decodable because they are 'irregular'. (scroll below for more on this!).

The Little Learners Love Literacy® Heart Words help construct meaningful decodable sentences for reading and writing. Heart Words are a crucial component of the Little Learners program as they allow children to benefit from independent reading as early as possible.

Which Heart Words you teach depends on the scope and sequence of your decodable books and explicit teaching program.

Sight words, high frequency words, irregular words, tricky words - what do we mean?

Sight words

Sight words are words that are recognised instantaneously.

Many words will eventually be stored in children's long term memory and easily recalled. You will be very familiar with this process, just think of the many times you've read a sign without consciously trying to do so. Once a word is orthographically mapped, it is stored in our memory for instant and automatic retrieval. This process of storing words occurs AFTER children have repeatedly decoded by sounding out.

Sight words are not memorised as a whole word and they are not limited to the top 200-300 high frequency words. We do not teach them by 'look and say'.

High frequency words

High frequency words are common words that appear very often in written texts. Heart Words include high frequency words such as was, the, said. But a great number of high frequency words are decodable, e.g. dog, man, sun.  The majority of words that beginning readers will encounter can be sounded out, especially if they’re using purposefully designed decodable texts. This is why the majority of teaching time in Little Learners Love Literacy is focussed on teaching the alphabetic code to decode words, and not on 100s of heart words!

Irregular or 'tricky' words

The term 'irregular words' is used widely to describe non-decodable words. Words exist on a spectrum from highly regular to highly irregular words. 

As we discussed at the start of this blog, some words are not irregular forever - they are not yet decodable because the student has not mastered all the graphemes that occur in the word. 

Let’s use the Stage 4 Heart Word, her as an example. It has two sounds, /h/ and /er/, it’s not decodable at stage 4, but will become decodable at Stage 7.2 when /er/ is introduced.

Other irregular words contain elements that do not follow the most common grapheme-phoneme correspondences. These spellings only appear in that word or a small number of related words. These words will remain irregular and non-decodable. There is little point explicitly teaching a grapheme-phoneme correspondence that only occurs in a small number of words, or one word even!

But most irregular words contain only one or two irregular spelling patterns. As a result, most irregular words can still be partially decoded. For the less common representations, we can explain the morphology or etymology of the words to help students make connections. 

Here I refer to the Stage +4 heart word, oh. This is the only word where the grapheme 'oh' represents the phoneme /ō/, this is likely due to etymology as the word is derived directly from Latin.

You can refer to our Heart Words Teaching Guide for additional support with breaking down the heart words.

What are our Heart Words?

There are three words in Stages 1 & 2 my the and I. These are words that children need to know, to read automatically in the decodable books.

Stage 3 introduces six new Heart Words: he she we to do and was. At this stage children are building up a bank of words that they can recognise automatically

.Stage 4 introduces an additional six Heart Words: 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. 

Heart Words take a  leap in Stage Plus 4. The Heart Word posters group words according to their phonemes and spelling patterns, for example: say, day, play. You can refer to the phonemes and graphemes to help children learn these words; some children will be ready at this stage and enjoy making links between what they have learned about decoding and reading heart words.

Stages 5 & 6 introduce interest words such as fireman, birthday, elephant, love, happy and zoo. It is always amazing that interest words such as chocolate and elephant are easily remembered by children. They are words that are a little more complex and some children will need more reading practice. Although there are a number of heart words introduced in these stages, the words are featured in only one or two books. Each book lists the heart words used in that story.

By Stage 7 the number of new heart words reduces dramatically as children already have knowledge of many common high frequency words.

Remember, every program has their own list of irregular or heart words to teach which relates to their explicit teaching sequence and decodable books - no one list is definitive.

Teaching Heart Words

To learn more about how to teach the Heart Words following our explicit teaching routine, read our blog Teaching Heart Words with Little Learners Love Literacy  or click below to book in a spot in our Heart Words webinar.