Tonight, my daughter and I sat down for our first lesson together since our move. I walked around the house gathering the things we would need: computer paper, colored pencils, a mini whiteboard, and a strip of letters from the Fundations kit that I was lucky enough to find. We sat at the kitchen table. I set my other two kiddos up with books of their own, which the 8-year-old read independently and the 4-year-old perused the pictures of. 

She was not happy about sitting down together. School has felt really hard lately. She’s been dragging her feet going in the morning and coming home exhausted. She’s mentioning things about how she can’t do what her teacher is asking her to do. She’s frustrated. 

We started with a simple drill. We went through each letter on the letter strip. I said the name of the letter, the keyword pictured, and the sound the letter and keyword represented. 

A - apple - /a/

B - bat - /b/

C -cat - /c/

And so on.

I said it first and asked her to repeat each one, touching the letter on the strip with a pencil as we went. She complied, but just barely, and with a tone that let me know she was not enjoying this. Then, I reversed it. I pointed to a line of about ten letters and asked one “Which one says /x/? That’s right! X - fox -/x/.”

I repeated this for most of the letters and sounds.

Next, I dictated a list of CVC words to her. I asked her to repeat the words, tap out the sounds on her fingers, and write them on the whiteboard, saying each sound out loud while she wrote it. It was tedious, but I cheered loudly every time she finished a word, and she fought a smile.

Finally, we wrote a letter to her friend in another city. She told me what she wanted to say and I tapped out the sounds in each word, writing it as I did so on the whiteboard. She would then write the word herself on the computer paper in pencil, erasing and correcting errors as she went with my guidance, sound by sound. 

For words that we couldn’t sound out (frequently referred to as sight words or high-frequency words), we sounded out the parts we could and put hearts around the parts we couldn’t, reminding ourselves that that was the part of the word we needed to memorize by heart. This process is called the Heart Word Approach and takes quite a bit of repetition to solidify. I found myself wishing that my daughter’s 1st grade teacher would practice all the irregular high-frequency words for her 1st grade class through this process. Instead, my daughter brings worksheets home that ask her to write the word over and over. She gets frustrated and hasn’t been able to master any of them through rote copying. 

To see a walkthrough of the heart word approach, check out this short video clip. To read more about this process, check out this blog post. You can start by learning how to help your child practice words through the heart word process at home and maybe even share the information with any teachers that you know.