Sight words and heart words

Sight words are words a student reads instantly, without sounding out. Every word a skilled reader knows becomes a sight word in that sense. In schools the term usually means high frequency words, such as "the", "said" and "was", that appear so often in print that students need them early.

Most high frequency words are partly regular. In "said", the s and the d are regular and only the middle is odd. The heart word method teaches the regular parts with phonics and marks the irregular part with a heart, so students learn the word by its sounds rather than by its shape.

The articles in this section explain sight words, heart words and the difference between the two. They cover why flash card memory alone is slow, how many words to teach at once, and how a word moves from "heart" to fully decodable once the pattern is taught.

The sight words pages list each common list with the irregular letters marked and the point at which each word becomes decodable.