The words

Tap any word to hear it. 7 of these 9 words are in the app, where each has its own sentence.

Irregular high-frequency words named by the federal practice guide 9

From Example 3.8 of the Institute of Education Sciences practice guide, which sets these against regular high-frequency words such as in, did, and, then, had, with, that, down and him. Only part of each of these is irregular.

What the heart word method is, and what the UK calls it

The University of Florida Literacy Institute explains it plainly: in most common irregular words only one or two letters fail to follow the expected letter sound correspondences, so a child can decode most of the word and learn only those letters by heart. A small heart is drawn over the awkward part. UFLI also distinguishes permanently irregular words from temporarily irregular ones, which are words a child has simply not been taught the patterns for yet. UK schools teach the same idea under different names. The Department for Education's Letters and Sounds programme calls them tricky words, and the national curriculum uses the term common exception words throughout.

Five minutes a day at home

Take one word. Say it, then say it slowly in sounds while your child writes a line for each sound. Ask which letters are doing what you expect and which are not. In said, the s and d behave and the ai does not, so only the ai gets the heart. Draw it. Read the word, cover it, write it from memory, uncover and check. Three words in five minutes is a good pace. Come back to the same three tomorrow before starting anything new. The value of the method is that it shrinks what has to be memorized from a whole word to a couple of letters.

How this fits with phonics

Heart words exist to keep irregular words inside phonics instead of setting them outside it. That matches what the federal What Works Clearinghouse guide asks for: teach the regular high-frequency words by applying letter sound knowledge, and teach only the genuine exceptions holistically. The Texas Education Agency goes further and warns teachers not to describe high-frequency words as non-decodable as a class, because many contain very common spelling patterns, and to point out the parts that do behave even in a word like was. That is the heart word idea in one sentence: name the part that follows the rules, and only memorize what is left.

Practice tips

Before teaching a word, work out which letters actually misbehave. It is usually one or two, not the whole word.
Draw a heart over only the awkward letters, and say out loud what the rest of the letters are doing correctly.
Use look, cover, write, check on the single word, not on a list of ten.
Return to yesterday's three words before starting new ones. Irregular letters need more repetitions than regular ones.
If your child's teacher says tricky words or common exception words, they mean the same thing. Use the school's word at home.

Related lists

Dolch sight words: The Dolch list is 220 service words in five levels, plus a separate list of 95 nouns, so 315 words in total.
High-frequency words: High-frequency words are the small group of words, usually put at 300 to 500, that account for a large share of everything in print.
Sight word sentences: A sight word sentence is a short sentence built almost entirely from words a child already knows, so the new word is the only hard thing in it.