Orthographic Mapping
Let’s Map Sight Words:
Heart words? Sight words? High frequency words? Orthographic mapping? I don’t know about you, but when I started hearing these terms thrown around, I was like….
...and then I thought- “I’m sorry, a sight word is a sight word is a sight word! But guess what? It’s actually not!
I think before we can talk about mapping heart words, we have to understand the terminology.
The Terminology
Sight words are words that we recognize instantly
High-frequency words are the words that appear most often in printed materials.
Regular or Irregular: Sight words and high frequency words can be both regular or irregular.
Regular sight words/high frequency words can be completely decoded. They follow a predictable pattern and students can use their phonics skills to decode them.
Irregularly spelled words are called heart words. Heart words are words that may have some decodable parts, BUT have at least one sound that is irregular. When we teach students the heart word method, we teach them that we have to know that irregular part by heart.
Now that we have cleared a few terms up, let’s take a look at the best way to teach these heart words.
Orthographic Mapping
So now that you understand what each of these mean, you are probably thinking- “Okay, where do I start?” Don’t worry, I got you! These words should be integrated into your phonics instruction. Why? We know that the majority of these words are decodable in some way.
So let’s talk about mapping! Here is the breakdown of how I map heart words!
Step 1
Introduce the word/attach meaning- I usually say the word and then use it in a sentence.
Step 2
Tap out the sounds you hear in the word.
Step 3
Determine how many sounds you hear and highlight that number of boxes.
Identify the “known” sounds
Step 4
Explicitly teach the irregular sounds in the word.
I know what you are thinking. You are thinking “This is not at all the way I was taught to teach sight words.” That’s okay!! The truth?? Me either!
It took me a long time to wrap my brain around the BEST way for me to teach this to my students. I had no idea what words to teach when and I honestly didn’t even know where to start. So… I did what I always do, I sat down with a pen and paper and got to work. Here is what I did:
Determined the top 100 sight words
Printed my phonics continuum
Decided where the words fit best into my phonics instruction
Determined which were regular (decodable) and which were irregular (heart words)
Now when I am teaching phonics, I use this document to make sure I am on track.
The best news? You don’t have to reinvent the wheel! You can download it here for free along with my phoneme grapheme mapping sheet!
Still on the fence? I will leave you with this final thought.
Did you know that it takes the human brain over 100 exposures to remember a word, but it only takes them 1-4 exposures to remember it when it is mapped! If we try to teach our students these words in isolation, then they only know the words that we teach them, meaning, if you teach a child 10 words, they only know 10 words. BUT if we teach a kid how to decode using the sound symbol relationships, the possibilities are endless.
