Heart Words: How to Teach Words That Can’t Be Sounded Out

Your child breezes through “cat,” “sun,” and “lamp” — then stalls cold on “said.” That’s not a decoding failure. It’s a heart word: what Jolly Phonics calls a “tricky word,” a word with one or two letters that don’t follow a rule your child has been taught yet, sitting inside letters they already know. Here’s exactly which part to sound out, which part to learn “by heart,” and how to teach the difference — this is one piece of the full picture in our phonics-first guide, building on the mapping skill in our orthographic mapping guide.

What’s a heart word, exactly?

Take “said.” Your child can already sound out s and d — those are regular, taught sounds. The middle, ai, is the problem: it spells /e/ here, not the long-a sound it usually makes. That one piece is the “heart” part — the bit with no rule to fall back on yet, so it gets circled, named, and memorised on its own, while the rest of the word is sounded out exactly like normal. A few more, broken down the same way:

• of — sound out o; the heart part is f, which says /v/ here instead of its usual sound.
• you — sound out y; the heart part is ou, spelling a long /oo/ instead of its taught sound.
• was — sound out w; the heart part is as, which says something closer to ‘woz’ than its regular sound.
• could — sound out c and d; the heart part is oul, with a silent l.
• one — the honest outlier: only the n is regular. Everything else about this word is heart. Worth naming out loud, so your child isn’t thrown when the trick doesn’t split evenly every time.

Does sounding it out even work on a word like “said”?

Yes — for most of the word. Reading researcher Linnea Ehri (2014) describes this as orthographic mapping: a reader bonds a word’s spelling to its sound using whatever regular letter-sound connections it contains, then tags the leftover part as a one-off exception. A heart word isn’t stored as a picture of its shape — it’s stored as a normal phonic map with one flagged exception, which is exactly why sounding out the regular letters first still matters, even on a word that can’t be fully decoded. It’s the same mapping process our orthographic mapping guide covers for fully regular words — heart words just add one irregular tag to an otherwise ordinary map.

What’s the five-minute heart-word routine?

This is the same shape of routine structured-literacy teaching materials call “Heart Word Magic” and what Jolly Phonics has always done under the name “tricky words” — mark only the irregular part, sound out the rest like any other word.

How does this change as my child gets older?

Early on, most of a heart word feels arbitrary. As your child learns more spelling patterns, some of that irregularity resolves itself — the ai in “said” eventually gets explained once they meet other ai-as-/e/ words, and what looked like a permanent exception turns out to be an early pattern they hadn’t been taught yet. This is the consolidation stage our orthographic mapping guide describes — by age seven or eight, most children need this routine less often, because fewer words are still genuinely exceptional to them.

Is this different in a Hindi-speaking home?

Honestly, there isn’t dedicated research on heart words specifically for Hindi-first learners — worth saying plainly rather than inventing a connection that doesn’t exist. What we do have is a 2024 randomised-control trial with Grade 2 students in Indian English-medium schools, which found real gains in sound-symbol knowledge from structured phonics instruction generally, though the gains didn’t always transfer cleanly to independent reading outside the practice activity — a fair caveat, not a reason to skip the routine. One thing worth watching for, as a hypothesis rather than a settled finding: children moving between Hindi and English sound systems sometimes merge /v/ and /w/, which could make heart words like “was,” “were,” or “one” a little stickier than others. If you notice that pattern, it’s worth a mention at your child’s next class, not a cause for concern on its own.

“The children who struggle with tricky words are almost always the ones drilling the whole word as one shape. The moment I show a parent to just heart the one letter and sound the rest like normal, the guessing stops within a week.” Monika Verma — Lead Trainer, LittleLearns

How do I know it’s actually working?

Parents also ask

Every child develops at their own pace — see our learning-outcomes note. This routine is a teaching technique, not a substitute for your child’s own reading program.