In this episode, Jessica Farmer shares tips for teaching heart words. She explains the importance of blending and introduces the concept of continuous blending. Jessica defines heart words as high-frequency words with irregular or temporarily irregular spellings. She emphasizes the need to follow a scope and sequence and provides a routine for introducing new heart words. Jessica also discusses the process of orthographic mapping and suggests engaging activities for teaching heart words. She concludes by recommending additional resources for teaching heart words.
Takeaways
Resources
We wrote a book! The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night
Don't miss an episode! Sign up for FREE bonus resources and episode alerts at LiteracyPodcast.com
Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum.
In this episode, Jessica Farmer shares tips for teaching heart words. She explains the importance of blending and introduces the concept of continuous blending. Jessica defines heart words as high-frequency words with irregular or temporarily irregular spellings. She emphasizes the need to follow a scope and sequence and provides a routine for introducing new heart words. Jessica also discusses the process of orthographic mapping and suggests engaging activities for teaching heart words. She concludes by recommending additional resources for teaching heart words.
Takeaways
Resources
We wrote a book! The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night
Don't miss an episode! Sign up for FREE bonus resources and episode alerts at LiteracyPodcast.com
Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum.
You're listening to. Melissa and Lori Love Literacy. If you are a primary teacher, you know that the old practice of memorizing a ton of sight words is not the best way for kids to learn to read. And if you're like us, we are sure you see so many videos on social media that say heart words are the answer to teaching those words with irregular parts that can't be decoded easily. But you're just not quite sure how to teach heart words yet. Don't worry. In this episode our teacher friend, jessica Farmer is here to share her routine for teaching heart words and some tips and tricks to make it super fun and effective. Hi teacher friends, I'm Lori and I'm Melissa. We are two educators who want the best for all kids and we know you do too.
Melissa:We worked together in Baltimore when the district adopted a new literacy curriculum.
Lori:We realized there was so much more to learn about how to teach reading and writing. Lori, and I can't wait to keep learning with you today and writing, lori, and I can't wait to keep learning with you today. Hi everyone, we love these quick tips from our teacher friends episodes because you get super practical tips for teaching that you can use in your classroom tomorrow and we are here today with Jessica Farmer, who you might recognize from Farmer Loves Phonics.
Melissa:She's a literacy advocate in the world of education on social media and she's also the lead trainer forves Phonics. She's a literacy advocate in the world of education on social media and she's also the lead trainer for Rainbow Phonics, and she will share some tips for teaching heart words today. Welcome, jessica Hi.
Jessica Farmer:I'm so excited to be here today.
Lori:Today we're talking about heart words, but before we jump into heart words, we want to talk about blending and some of the tips that you have for blending. We know that blending is essential for reading any word. Can you explain what blending is and why it's so important?
Jessica Farmer:Yeah, so blending is when we put sounds together to form words, so we might have a word like fish, and we want to blend the sounds together and teach students how to do that.
Jessica Farmer:When they're reading a word on a page, and typically we hear people blend like this fish and they segment between the sounds before connecting them. But there's something called continuous blending that I want to share about. It's also called connected phonation and it's a blending method in which you connect the phonemes without breaking between those sounds, and it helps students really connect those sounds together, especially if you have students who are omitting a sound, adding in a new sound or saying a completely different word. So it would sound like this fish fish, and that will really help your beginning readers and struggling readers be able to blend words. There was a study in 2020 that showed that this method of blending really works best for students who are reading non-words. They were able to read them more accurately than the students that learned to segment before blending, and new readers almost every word is an unknown word to them. So we can really apply this to our classroom immediately and you will see a huge difference in your students that were struggling to blend and now they can blend. Very easily.
Lori:Okay, that makes perfect sense. I am going to try that tomorrow. Yeah, but I do have a quick question. So what do you do when students know all their sounds and they can? They can do the sounds, but they are struggling to blend, like they're struggling to spell as they're like, blend as they're spelling. If that makes sense, do you still use that same approach?
Jessica Farmer:So I like to keep segmenting for spelling and continuous blending for decoding, because because both are essential you have to be able to blend and you have to be able to segment. It's not like we're like saying goodbye to segmenting forever, and students have to be able to segment. It's not like we're like saying goodbye to segmenting forever, and students have to be able to separate those sounds in order to be able to spell accurately. So we've got to teach both and I think it's really good to move back and forth from blending to segmenting, segmenting to blending. But if students are struggling to blend, then that continuous blending method is really going to help them. But they still need to segment for spelling and I often don't hear as many students struggling with segmenting as they do with blending. Students can get that segmenting down. You know if they're tapping or they're pounding out sounds, but it's that blending where they get stuck.
Melissa:So we are going to transition now to heart words. We really want to hear how you teach heart words. What is a heart word?
Jessica Farmer:Yeah, so let's define a heart word. It is usually a word that is high frequency, but it typically contains an irregular or temporarily irregular spelling within it, and it's usually the vowel sound, but not always, and that is considered the tricky part, the heart part. So that's how I define a heart word.
Melissa:So you know, we hear about the Dolch word list and the Fry word list and I think often people are memorizing those words. So what I know is that teaching with heart words is an alternative way to teach those words, which many are irregular, Many of those words on those lists. Is that Can we?
Lori:have an example of a couple of those words, melissa, like I'm thinking of. The word was yeah, might be an irregular. Can you think of any others? Said is always an example.
Jessica Farmer:Yeah, and I've got said behind me for anybody who's watching.
Melissa:Yeah, and I've got, I've got said behind me for anybody who's watching Um, and I'm going to model, I'm going to model said today irregular until they learn that pattern.
Jessica Farmer:So a lot of those first words will be yeah, and those lists are helpful in that they help us know which words are high frequency, which words are going to show up most often. But the thing about those lists are many of them are decodable once students know the code. So sorting those lists is important. We want to sort them by irregular, temporarily irregular and decodable. And so there is a really fantastic article on reading rockets and we can link it in the show notes. It's called A New Model for Teaching High Frequency Words. It's by the Readsters. It's a must read.
Jessica Farmer:I share it with my followers all the time. I'm always sending it out to anybody who's like how do I teach a heart word? I'm like you got to read this first and it has great information. But it also has word lists already sorted for you. So it has Ooh, it takes the work out. I love that, yeah, so it has them sorted by vowel, consonant pattern, cvc pattern, digraphs. It's got them all sorted for you and it shows you what number it is on the Dolch list and what number it is on the Fry list. So you definitely have to check out that article. It'll really help. You kind of know that you can still teach these words. But we're going to apply it to our phonics scope and sequence.
Lori:So you can sound out heart words just to kind of click, double click that stamp it. Whatever we want to say, we can sound out heart words. We can sound out seemingly irregular words.
Jessica Farmer:Yes, yes, absolutely, because speech came before print. So therefore any words that are printed on a page, they're just speech written down. So as long as you can connect the sounds to the spellings and you know which parts are irregular or tricky, you can sound out any word, even if it's the word kernel that is spelled so totally different than the way we pronounce it. Do you mean the C-O-L? I?
Lori:do the C-O-L Okay, because I envisioned a popcorn at first and then I realized what you were talking about.
Jessica Farmer:Yes, like a kernel in the. You know, yes, a kernel. As long as you know the irregular spellings, you can still sound that word out. But most people weren't taught with phonics methods, so they don't understand how to sound words out.
Melissa:Yeah, and you mentioned scope and sequence. So I just want to like why is it important if you're teaching these heart words? Why does your scope and sequence matter? How does that fit in?
Jessica Farmer:Yeah, so we need to introduce these heart words depending on what is needed at that moment, and every program is different, every scope and sequence is different, and so if you have these decodable books, then they might have the word the in the very first book because that's a very frequent word. So you're going that's usually one of the first words that you teach the is and said those are up there of was. There's a good handful of words that you need to learn, because you won't be able to read any sentences if it's just purely CVC words. You know short vowel words. You've got to have some of those irregular words. But if we're just teaching a huge list of heart words, that's essentially going back to doing the same thing memorizing a huge list of words. So following the scope and sequence and making sure that those irregular words are introduced slowly and as needed is going to be the best method for students so that we're not overloading them trying to memorize all of these words.
Melissa:I love that differentiation of just lists of words that we're getting to them some way or another, whether it's memorizing or heart words, but really doing it purposefully with what they'll be reading, what they need Absolutely.
Jessica Farmer:Makes a lot of sense.
Lori:All right, so I'm going to transition us into what we've been waiting for, Jessica. Finally we're here. So this is always my favorite part of every conversation, which is the very practical application. So let's talk about teaching heart words. We know it's really important to follow a routine and we know there are certain steps for introducing a new heart word. I'm hoping that you can take us through your routine for teaching heart words.
Jessica Farmer:Yes, yay, and I'm. I'm reading my routine just so I don't skip any steps and, as a teacher, when you have to teach a routine whether it's for vocabulary or blending or dictation make yourself a sticky note and write your routine down, because it's very easy to forget a step as you're teaching. There's distractions in the classroom and you might forget something that's important. So I'm looking at my routine right now and I have it included in a heart word resource that I created that's got 30 early high frequency words that you can teach your beginning readers. So step one is to say the word and the students need to repeat the word. You cannot skip the repeat because in order to own a word, you have to say it. So if my word is said, we're going to say said, repeat, and the students will say said.
Jessica Farmer:Then we're going to count the sounds and that's where we tie in that phonemic awareness and we are going to segment because we're going to be working on spelling this word. So we're going to say the sounds. You can use sound boxes. You can just draw lines on the whiteboard. You don't have to have anything fancy to do this. You can do sound dots on the board as you count the sounds, but have students count the sounds with you. So we're going to count the sounds instead, s-e-d-s-e said, and students will say oh, there's three sounds in that word. Then we are going to model the spellings and we're going to point out the regular spellings first. So the first sound is s. How do we spell s? S? S.
Lori:S.
Jessica Farmer:Yes, so we spell that with S. Hopefully my little magnets work today. Okay, there we go, they work, yay, yay. My last sound is D. How do we spell D?
Melissa:D, d, mm-hmm.
Jessica Farmer:And then I'm going to model the tricky part for students.
Jessica Farmer:I'm going to say normally we spell E with E, but in this word we're spelling eh with a I, and that's our heart part.
Jessica Farmer:And so I might, on the board, draw heart said, read the word said, and then I'm going to use it in a sentence so that students can connect to meaning, because a lot of these words are function words and Dr Katie Pace-Miles talks about this a lot and she talked about it at her presentation at the Reading League Conference and so a lot of these words are very hard to define the meaning of them without placing them within a sentence and learning them in context. So you want to come up with a sentence or have students come up with a sentence for the word, and then the last step is going to be having them write the word, and you can do that in a notebook, you can have a worksheet that you have them doing, but it's really important for them to say the sounds as they're writing the word, and they can, you know, put a heart over the heart part or underline it or circle it or highlight it, whatever you want to do, just keep the routine the same every single time that you do this, and that's it.
Melissa:So the heart isn't actually. I mean, you can use a heart, like you said, but you can use anything. It's really just that what you're doing is pointing out that irregular part for them and making it very clear In this word it's AI Usually we would think it would be E and just pointing that out to them.
Lori:Exactly, yeah, yeah. So once they've learned the sound spelling correspondences, then the heart word becomes a sight word, and we know that all words want to become sight words. So we're doing our job right and helping students put it in their long-term memory for words. Is that right?
Jessica Farmer:Exactly, it's a process called orthographic mapping, where we store words in our brain. This is not an activity we can do. You can't do orthographic mapping, which was something that was going around for a while that you know. Oh, this is orthographic mapping. No, that's something your brain does. You can promote orthographic mapping to happen in your brain by mapping, saying a word, connecting the letter sequences together, and then practicing it through reading and writing. That's going to promote orthographic mapping, which will then help your brain to store that word for effortless retrieval. But your brain is always looking at the individual spellings, connecting them together and then having that meaning stored as well is kind of the last piece of the puzzle that helps you remember that word for effortless retrieval.
Melissa:And I think too it also. This might not work for the said example. You correct me if I'm wrong, but you know, then they might see that pattern again, right?
Lori:So once you've taught that, I don't think well, you just said again, Again, isn't that the same? And again. Great, I was like trying to think of one and then I said it.
Melissa:But I know, said is because, also because it's like the past tense of say so, said. So it's kind of the morphology.
Jessica Farmer:Yeah, you can connect it to pay, paid, say, said. Sometimes our pronunciations change over time. We might not do that for a kindergartner who needs to know how to read said. That's why we have to teach it as a sight word at first, but then by first grade, second grade, when we start learning long vowel sounds and we learn about A-Y, then we can make that connection. Oh, remember when you learned that word, said, that's the past tense of say, and so we have pay, paid, say, said. But yes, it might have been pronounced said long ago and then our pronunciation has changed over time.
Melissa:Right, so cool. And then, like you said, lori, if they see the word again once they get there, it's like, oh, that's not so strange, because instead the AI makes that same sound.
Lori:There's another option for set for variability, right, and so there's an option. Instead of them saying again, again, right, I imagine they're going to start going through some ideas, for what might that sound? Might say Then they have another option there, okay, again. Oh, I've heard that word before. That's a word Said again. Yeah, that's the same sound.
Melissa:So that's cool. So, jessica, do you have any other like fun tips for heart words? Do you have anything that makes it like super engaging for kids?
Jessica Farmer:Yeah, so you can do fun activities like color by sounds. So not rainbow writing really, but coloring by the sounds. So if we're coloring instead, you know we're going to do a color for S, a colorful, a color for AI and a color for the D, so that we're doing it by sounds and not just by letters, not memorizing the order of the letters. And I also like unscramble the spelling, so if we have the spelling scrambled we can put them in order. But I think having a routine is the most important component. Students are engaged when they know what to expect.
Jessica Farmer:And I'm going to quote the amazing Dr Anita Archer. She would say teach the stuff and cut the fluff. So not every lesson has to be a Pinterest worthy lesson and you do not have to be the cruise director at all times. I know social media gives off the vibe that you need to be, but you don't. It can be very simple, routine-based. Students thrive on routine. So I say go for routine over fun. But if you need to switch it up, there's always little things you can do and if you call it a game, they think it's a game.
Lori:I love that. I feel like it's actually really reassuring to hear that from you, who you know. Every time I see you on social media I'm like, oh, she's so Pinterest worthy. So that is very reassuring to hear from you, jessica, absolutely.
Melissa:Absolutely.
Lori:Jessica, is there anything else that you'd like to share about HeartWords that we haven't yet talked about?
Jessica Farmer:I think we covered a lot of it. I think, just to summarize, make sure that you are not just swapping the fry and dolch list for another long list of heart words that you are pushing your students to memorize. I think what's really important is finding a scope and sequence that includes those heart words along the way and introduces them slowly and as needed, so that we're really focusing on teaching sound to spelling correspondences, which is what the brain needs to learn to read.
Melissa:Before we leave. Is there anywhere else that you would want to send our listeners to learn more about heart words and or where they can find more information from you about anything?
Jessica Farmer:Absolutely, so. I share a lot about HeartWords on social media. I do videos where I model my routine with my resources, so you can follow me on Instagram, on TikTok, on Facebook and on YouTube as well. I also love that article that is on reading rockets, so definitely click on that link, read that article and utilize the word lists that are already sorted for you. They've done the work for you so you don't have to do it. And Dr Katie Pace-Miles has some resources on her website as well, and I think you just had her on recently right, we sure did.
Lori:Well, we can't thank you enough for being here. We're so glad that you gave us some time to be our teacher friend and share all these quick tips about heart words yeah, absolutely to stay connected with us, sign up for our email list at literacypodcastcom, join our facebook group and follow us on instagram and twitter if this episode resonated with you, take a moment to share with a teacher friend or leave us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts.
Melissa:Just a quick reminder that the views and opinions expressed by the hosts and guests of the Melissa and Lori Love Literacy Podcast are not necessarily the opinions of Great Minds PBC or its employees.
Lori:We appreciate you so much and we're so glad you're here to learn with us.