High Frequency Words Part 2: Heart Words

In part one of High Frequency Words I wrote about the difference between high frequency words and sight words.  If you don't know the difference--I highly encourage you to check out the first post by clicking here.  

For this post we will focus on irregularly spelled high frequency words--or as many leading reading researchers call them heart words.  

First, let's make sure we understand the definition. Heart words are high frequency words that have some part of their word irregularly spelled.  We need to know these words by heart because they show up frequently in text and are used often while writing.  If we know them by heart, than we can read and spell them automatically.  

Lets look at some examples of heart words below.  In the word "the" the /th/ sound matches how it is supposed to be spelled,  yet the "e" makes the schwa sound when it really should say its long sound.  This word is heart word because part of it is spelled irregularly.  A heart is placed on top of the "e" to signify that is the part of the word that is not following a pattern.  It is always important to point out to students the parts that do follow a phonics pattern, and the parts that don't. 

In the word "from," the /f/ /r/ and /m/ sounds match the correct grapheme, yet the "o" makes a short u sound instead of a short o sound.  This word is a heart word because it has an irregularity in terms of how it is spelled. 

In the Dolch high frequency word list, 82 of the words would be considered heart words.  That is 37% of the list.  These 82 (plus an additional 14) words are shown below in a table from Readsters and their publication of A New Model for Teaching High Frequency Words. Readsters grouped these heart words based on similar spelling patterns.

Our job as teachers is to make these tricky heart words not so tricky.  We need to make the tricky sticky!  So, please join me for the next post in this series: how to help kids master heart words!