Heart Words: What They Are, Resources to Practice Them + 2 Freebies!

January 17, 2025

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Hi friends!

Have you recently come across the term heart words and wondering what they are? Or maybe you’re an early SoR adopter and have been teaching irregular high frequency words this way for a few years now! I first learned about heart words when I started my SoR learning journey a few years ago.

Like many of you, I used to teach a list of high frequency words as “sight words” and had students memorizing the entire word. As a matter of fact, I used to do lots of things that I have now learned is not the best way to teach reading (like having students look at the first letter, the picture and guess the word, for example!). It’s easy to feel guilty, but just remember you were teaching the way you thought was the best way. You were doing what you thought was the best at the time, and now we are going to do it the way brain research says is the best way for kids to learn and retain irregular high frequency words!

So, what are heart words? And how are they different from high frequency words and sight words? And why are we switching to this method of teaching high frequency words? I was starting to write a lengthly explanation but I found this blog post by Lauren from A Teachable Teacher that explains it SO well so I’m linking it here instead: https://www.ateachableteacher.com/heart-words/

The only thing I do differently is that I don’t differentiate between temporarily irregular words (she calls them flash words) and truly irregular words (which she calls heart words). If a sound correspondence appears that hasn’t been taught yet (e.g. the ee sound in see) it is just marked as a part to memorize “by heart”.

Over the years I’ve developed some resources to help my own two kids learn/reinforce the heart words that they are learning at school (their school uses UFLI as their core phonics instruction so all of my resources are aligned to the Kindergarten UFLI Scope & Sequence) so I thought I’d share some of those resources with you today in case you also teach heart words following the UFLI Scope & Sequence!

1. Heart Word Practice Sheets: Map, Trace & Write

This is the first thing I made up for my then end of JK son to reinforce mapping and writing heart words. It’s simple but has all of the main components needed such as segmenting the word into it’s individual sounds (tap it), identifying which sounds connect to which letter/letters and identifying the irregular part that you need to memorize (or “learn by heart”). We had a bunch of heart stickers left over from Valentine’s Day when we first started using these worksheets so we used that to mark the “heart part” since drawing a heart by himself would have been frustrating for him at that time. You could also use the small heart stamps if you have them or I have also used the heart stamp marker in this marker set as well: Crayola Emoji Washable Stampers Markers

2. Heart Word Slides and Ladders

A few months after we started learning heart words, my son became really interested in board games (he was especially obsessed with Candy Land at the time!) so I made up this Heart Word Slides and Ladders game! I printed the board and a stack of the cards (just the ones he had learned as I wanted this to be a review game) and placed the stack of cards facing down. Then we took turns flipping a card, saying the word and moving that many spaces. He loved this and we played it many times over summer break! I think this would be perfect to play in small groups for students who need more practice with heart words❤️

3. Heart Word Mini Books

Heart word mini books that are similar to my sight word mini books has been requested numerous times over the years so last year I finally sat down (virtually) with 3 other Kindergarten educators who use UFLI and created these to align with the UFLI S&S!

It has some of the same components (like tracing/printing the word and circling the word) but also has some new elements like mapping the word at the beginning, reading a sentence (or story) with the heart word in it and circling the picture that matches OR drawing a picture that matches and writing a sentence with the heart word in it (with 3 different options for easy differentiation!)

I have been used these at home to reinforce reading and writing heart words that my oldest has learned at school and will be starting them with my youngest guy soon too!

Here are the links to all three resources if you are interested in grabbing any of these for your classroom!

And now, on to the freebies!

1. Heart Word Word Charts

A few months ago my oldest asked me to print out word charts for him to copy off of. He recently began taking an interest in writing so of course I said sure and printed him off a set of these: Alphabet Word Charts

He was happily copying down pages and pages of words when he asked me if he could practice writing heart words. At first I pulled his UFLI home practice sheets but it was hard to keep all the little papers organized so the next day I sat down and made a few charts for him so that we could add it to his Alphabet Word Charts binder!

If you would like to add these as a resource for your students to use at your writing centre, you can grab them for free by clicking here or on the button below:

2. Heart Word Flash Cards

I was asked a few times to share the flash cards I made for the Slides and Ladders game (but with out the +1, +2 etc.) so I finally made them! I have printed out a set and plan to use these with my 4 year old to introduce heart words that will appear in his decodable books prior to reading them. He has a good grasp on sounding out and blending CVC words so I think this will be a good next step for him!

Want to grab these cards? Just click here or on the button below to download them from my Google Drive!