Heart Words: The Right Way to Teach Irregular Words Like Said and Was

The Words That Break the Rules

Your child is sounding out words beautifully - cat, sun, hop - and then a sentence serves up the word said. They decode it faithfully: /s/ /ā/ /ĭ/ /d/... "say-id?" Confusion. The rules they just learned didn't work.

English has a small set of words like this: extremely common words with a spelling that doesn't play fair. Said. Was. The. Of. Come. You can't avoid them - they're in nearly every sentence ever written for a child. Reading programs call them heart words. You'll also hear red words (from Orton-Gillingham classrooms, where they're written in red) or tricky words. All three names mean the same thing: high-frequency words with an irregular part, taught with a specific technique - and taught honestly, as rule breakers.

What Are Heart Words?

A heart word is a high-frequency word in which some part is spelled irregularly - the letters don't make their expected sounds. In was, the a says /u/ instead of /ă/. In of, the f says /v/. In said, the ai says /ĕ/.

Here's the key insight, and it changes everything about how these words should be taught: usually only PART of the word is irregular.

Look at said again:

• s says /s/ - perfectly regular
• ai says /ĕ/ - irregular! This is the tricky part
• d says /d/ - perfectly regular

Two of the three sounds follow the rules. So instead of memorizing said as a shape - a photograph of four letters - the child maps the regular sounds normally and puts a heart over the tricky part: the ai. The heart means "this part you learn by heart." Everything else, you decode like always.

This is called sound mapping, and it keeps the child's decoding machinery engaged even on irregular words. The word isn't a random string to memorize; it's a mostly-normal word with one flagged exception - far easier to store and retrieve. Only occasionally does a whole word need the heart.

Heart Words vs. Sight Word Lists

If you learned to read on flashcard drills of hundreds of "sight words," here's the modern correction: heart words are the only words that should be memorized - and there aren't many of them.

Many programs hand children lists of 100, 200, 300 sight words to memorize whole, including words like big, not, and went that are perfectly decodable. That approach trains a child to treat every word as a shape to recall rather than a code to crack - and it quietly teaches guessing. We've written a full breakdown of this in Phonics vs Sight Words, but the short version: the genuinely irregular core of English is only around a hundred words, and even those are mostly decodable except for one flagged part.

So the division of labor is clean. Decodable words - the overwhelming majority - are sounded out. Heart words - a small, specific set - get the heart treatment. Memorization is the exception, used exactly where the code fails and nowhere else.

Introduce the Rule Breaker Before the Story

There's a sequencing principle here that most parents have never heard, and it's one of the most important ideas in early reading instruction.

A heart word must be introduced on its own - explicitly framed as a rule breaker - BEFORE your child ever meets it in a story.

Why? Think about what happens otherwise. Your child is reading along, decoding successfully, feeling like the code works. Then was appears with no warning. They apply the rules - /w/ /ă/ /s/, "wass" - and fail. Not because they did anything wrong, but because the word cheated. Do this a few times and something corrosive happens: the child stops trusting sounding out. That's the moment guessing habits are born.

The fix is a small ceremony of honesty. Before the story, the new heart word gets its own moment: "This word is was. It's a rule breaker - the a doesn't play fair, so we learn that part by heart." The child maps the regular sounds, hearts the tricky part, and practices it. Then the story arrives, was appears, and the child recognizes it - a known rule breaker, handled. Trust in decoding stays intact.

This is exactly how Sweet Phonics sequences it: every heart word gets its own dedicated introduction with a heart over the irregular part, and only then does it start appearing in stories and games. The best classroom programs follow the same loop - teach the red word, then make sure it shows up immediately in the next decodable passage so the new word gets real practice while it's fresh.

Some Heart Words Are Only Temporarily Tricky

Here's a subtlety that makes the whole system smarter: **a heart word isn't necessarily irregular forever - sometimes it's just irregular for now.**

Take come. To a brand-new reader it's a rule breaker. But the deeper story is that come breaks the magic e rule - a rule the child hasn't learned yet. Explaining "this word breaks magic e" to a child who's never heard of magic e would be meaningless. So early on, come is simply taught as a word we learn by heart, no explanation attempted.

Later, once magic e is taught, the framing can be upgraded: "Remember come? Now you can see exactly which rule it breaks." Words like put, want, and could follow the same arc - whole-word heart treatment first, real explanation once the relevant rule exists. Teachers call this progressive disclosure: tell the truth, but only the amount of truth the child can currently use. Some words even graduate entirely - once a child learns that y can say /ī/, a word like my stops being tricky at all.

Teach Them in Frequency Order

Which heart words first? Follow frequency - teach the words your child will meet soonest and most often. A well-tested order begins:

the, said, I, you, your, of, are, what, was, to, do, want, some, from, come...

The comes first for an obvious reason: it's the most common word in English, and no child can read even one sentence without it. Working down the frequency list means every heart word your child learns pays immediate rent in real reading.

How to Practice Heart Words at Home

Map and heart it. Write the new word large. Together, sound out each part - and when you hit the tricky part, draw a heart above it. "S says /s/... this ai is the tricky part, it says /ĕ/ - heart it!... d says /d/."

Say the tricky part out loud. Have your child tell you which part breaks the rules and what it says instead. Naming the irregularity is the memorization - it beats staring at flashcards.

Keep a rule breakers list. A small poster of mastered heart words your child can cross off or decorate. Five to ten at a time is plenty; this is a short list by design.

Spot it in tonight's book. After introducing a heart word, hunt for it during storytime. Every real-text encounter after an explicit introduction is a rep that strengthens the word.

Never flashcard decodable words. If a school list sends home went or big for memorization, quietly sound them out instead. Save the hearts for the true rule breakers.

The Short Version

Heart words are the small set of high-frequency words - said, was, the, of, come - with an irregular part. Map the regular sounds normally, put a heart over the tricky part, and memorize only that. Introduce each one explicitly as a rule breaker before it appears in a story, so your child's trust in sounding out never takes the hit. Teach them in frequency order, revisit the "why" as new rules unlock, and keep the memorized list where it belongs: short.