We teach using the University of Florida Literacy Institute (UFLI) Foundations Program, an explicit and systematic approach to teaching foundational reading skills. Through UFLI, students develop phonemic awareness, letter-sound correspondences, decoding (reading), encoding (spelling), heart words (high-frequency words), and reading connected text.

Heart words are words that students are learning to recognize automatically, or "by heart," because they may not always follow regular spelling patterns. Daily practice at home makes a big difference! A Google Slides deck is linked here for you to use when practicing these heart words with your child. Just a few minutes of practice each day will help build confidence and reading fluency.