Heart Words

About this tool

Heart Words is the Science-of-Reading routine teachers draw on whiteboards every morning: a high-frequency word that will not obey the code sits in sound boxes, and the child taps each box to mark the sounds. The regular parts — the parts the child can already read — press in and settle, because those parts are the lesson. The one stubborn part gets a heart sealed onto the corner of its tile, letters still perfectly readable underneath, and a warm voice says: this part we learn by heart. There is no marking, no score and no wrong tap available; every box is tappable, in any order, so nothing here can go wrong.

Then the routine finishes, which is the part most sight-word tools leave out. Say it, map it, and now WRITE it: the word disappears and the same empty boxes stay where they were, so the child writes from memory and brings the word back to check it themselves. Nothing is ever marked — the checking belongs to the child. Flip the other way and the word turns up where it actually lives, inside a short spoken sentence, with a picture when the sentence has a real noun to show and a big clean line of type when it does not, because a cat on the card for the would teach a new reader that the means cat.

Behind the shelf pill is the teacher’s desk: search every word, open a shelf, read why each word is tricky, and add your own. Type a word and the tool proposes where the sounds break — you fix the breaks with a tap and then mark the part your class must learn by heart, because the tool will never guess that for you. Words you map become readable cards on a shelf that never counts them, and the review ring quietly revisits the ones you met longest ago. The first shelf is free forever and is a complete routine — mapping, the heart, the write step, the sentence, the shelf, the review ring, and the printable word cards. Premium opens the later shelves, keeps your own word list, and adds the wall strip and the take-home sheet.

How to use it in class

• Pick a shelf, then tap each box in the word while the class says the sounds — order does not matter.
• When the heart appears, pause: that is the part to learn by heart, and the voice will say so.
• Tap Now write it, let the class write the word from memory, then bring it back and compare.
• Open My words to add your own list — the tool splits it, you correct it and mark the heart.
• Use Big word to fill the screen for the back of the room, and print the fold-over cards for word work.

Classroom ideas

• Project one heart word at the start of every phonics lesson and let a different child do the mapping.
• Type this week’s spelling list into My words, mark the hearts together, and teach from the class’s own words.
• Print the fold-over cards for the pocket chart, then revisit the shelf on Friday to see how it filled up.
• Use the sentence side for newcomers and language learners: the picture plus the spoken sentence carries the meaning a function word cannot.