Little Learners 

The Little Learners decodable books contain funny stories and quirky illustrations to grab children’s attention.

Children love to follow the familiar characters on new adventures through the stages of the Little Learners program.

The Little Learners decodable books are delightful stories that children can read using their phonics knowledge, the letters and sounds that they have been explicitly taught using the LLLL sequences, plus a few HEART words.

What are Heart Words?

Heart words are a strategy to help children memorise irregular parts of a sight word rather than a whole word.

Heart words are introduced at each stage of the Little Learners sequence. Heart words are words that children need to ‘learn by heart’, as they cannot decode them yet. The words are often explicitly taught with a little heart above the part of the word that they need to learn ‘by heart’.

Heart words such as ‘the’ and ‘said’ are needed to create a sentence and a story. Many heart words will become decodable later in the program when children have learnt more of the alphabet code.

We need heart words to make sentences and stories – for reading and writing.

Research tells us that children learn these words best when they focus on the phoneme-grapheme correspondences. So, when introducing a new heart word, rather than teaching each word as a whole-word unit, it is more effective to examine the sequence of graphemes and focus on the difficult parts of the word.

For example:

The word ‘you’. There are two sounds in ‘you’: /y/ and /oo/. We already know that the letter y represents the /y/ sound. The difficult bit is the /ou/ - the letters o and u represent the /oo/ sound I this word (two letters, one sound): y-ou, you.        

Top Tips for Reading at Home

• Encourage your child to point at the graphemes (letters) and say the sounds, then ask them to read the heart words.
• Encourage your child to sound out to read unknown words when they are stuck.
• Make sure your child tracks their finger underneath the words as they read them.

REMEMBER that this is the beginning of your child’s learning to read journey and, just as when they were learning to walk, your child will need support to build confidence.