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Students have traditionally been taught that trick words (sometimes referred to interchangeably as sight words, high-frequency words, or irregular words) must be memorized. Memorization can be tedious and extremely difficult and this approach simply does not work for many students.
The Heart Word method is an approach to teaching trick words that emphasizes the phonetic components of these words. It teaches students that parts of these words are predictably phonetic and only a few sounds must actually be memorized instead of the entire word.
How to Teach Heart Words
1) Introduce the word and have students practice saying it aloud.
2) Together, tap out each sound you hear in the word. Students can use their fingers to tap and count the sounds. Tally the taps to determine how many sounds they hear in the word.
3) Identify the sounds in the word that can be sounded out phonetically. Once students have identified the regular sounds, they can place a colored box under each corresponding letter. Here’s a quick example.
In the word was, the /w/ sound is phonetically regular. However, the /as/ sound is irregular in this context - which can be tricky for little ears to hear!
Readers will place a colored box under “w”: the only letter that can be sounded out regularly.
4) Here come the irregular sounds! Students will place a heart under the letters that correspond to the irregular sound.
Again using the word was as an example, students would draw a heart below the /as/.
5) Educators should explicitly teach the irregular sound formed by the heart letters. The goal is to learn this sound “by heart” so that students can effortlessly read the entire heart word.
Source: The Reading Teacher
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