Ep. 190: How to Teach Heart Words with Jessica Farmer (Quick Tips from our Teacher Friends)
Apr 12, 2024
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Expert Jessica Farmer shares tips on teaching heart words, emphasizing blending and continuous blending in literacy education. Heart words are high-frequency words with irregular spellings. Importance of systematic teaching, orthographic mapping, and engaging activities for heart words. Resources and recommendations for teaching heart words effectively.
20:25
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Quick takeaways
Continuous blending connects phonemes seamlessly for effective word decoding.
Teaching heart words systematically improves reading proficiency and retention.
Deep dives
Importance of Blending for Reading
Blending sounds together to form words is crucial for reading. Continuous blending, where sounds are connected without breaks, helps students better blend words. This method has been shown to be effective, especially for students struggling with blending non-words. Teaching both blending and segmenting is essential for reading and spelling accuracy.
Understanding Heart Words
Heart words are high-frequency words with irregular spellings, often involving unique vowel sounds. Teaching heart words is an alternative approach to memorizing lists of irregular words like 'said' or 'was'. Sorting heart words by regular, irregular, and decodable helps in meaningful word instruction. Teaching heart words within the phonics scope and sequence aids in effective reading instruction.
Effective Routine for Teaching Heart Words
A structured routine for teaching heart words includes word repetition, sound counting, phonemic awareness activities, modeling spellings, and contextual usage. Interactive activities like coloring by sounds and unscrambling spellings can engage students. Establishing a routine over flashy activities can promote consistent learning and retention of heart words.
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
Blending is the process of putting sounds together to form words, and continuous blending is a method that connects phonemes without breaking between the sounds.
Segmenting is important for spelling, while continuous blending is effective for decoding words.
Heart words are high-frequency words with irregular or temporarily irregular spellings, often involving vowel sounds.
Teaching heart words should be done in a systematic and routine-based manner, following a scope and sequence.
Engaging activities for teaching heart words include coloring by sounds and unscrambling the spelling.