Fry 39;s Fourth 100 Words

[Ilse Marseau]

Heartwords are high frequency words that have some part of their word irregularly spelled. Students need to know these words by heart because they show up frequently in text and are used often while writing.

A heart word example is the word "the." The /th/ sound matches how it is supposed to be spelled, yet the "e" makes the schwa sound when it really should say its long sound. This word is heart word because part of it is spelled irregularly.

With heart word flashcards, a heart is placed on top of the word part that is not following a pattern. It is always important to point out to students the parts that do follow a phonics pattern, and the parts that don't.

This resource is science based and includes everything you will need to successfully teach your students the heart word method for those tricky, irregularly spelled heart words. This resource also includes background information for the teachers as well as an instructional routine to help your students map Fry's fourth 100 high frequency words. This NO PREP resource will save you time and your students will become heart word masters!

These digital and printable high frequency word flashcards are an easy and engaging way to fit in daily fluency practice. Words are on easy to read, black and white slides so there is no distracting images or patterns. The tricky part of heart words is clearly labeled with an underline and heart. Practice these words using a projector screen, interactive whiteboard, tablet, computer...or print them out for small groups or for students to take home!

But all the time the book was germinating, sprouting and preparing itself for harvest in the vasty fields of my unconscious. I had the advantage of knowing the plot. Homer, Virgil, Aeschylus, Euripides and a clutch of Anons had done all that work for me a long time ago. For the next three and half years then, when I was not writing, when I was accusing myself of shirking and avoiding writing, the unconscious was nonetheless every day and every night, selecting, discarding, ordering, reordering, considering, ditching, tweaking and twiddling.

I could say that Odyssey took me less than a month to complete or that it took four years. Hence, the earlier statement about the book being simultaneously the slowest to come from my pen and the quickest. In fact, I could say it cost far more grumpy head-scratching and coffee-swilling to dream up and deliver the five Substack articles I have produced for you lovely subscribers in that same wedge of time than it did to complete the book itself.

He is awoken at three in the morning by the sound of typing. He opens his eyes and cannot believe what he sees. Two elves are bouncing up and down on the keyboard. Five more elves take pages out of the printer and carefully stack them into a neat sheaf.

He sends it off to his agent first thing in the morning. A day and a half later, he hears back. The studio is beyond impressed and pleased, and they want a five-picture contract with Elwood. They offer a sum of money that knocks him sideways with joy.

One thing that struck me when reading this blog: all those delays led to your Odyssey seeing the day at the most fitting moment. The moment when the world is facing possibly the biggest migration crisis of our lifetime and millions of people are living away from home, without much hope for a new one, let alone for coming back to their old one.

Personally, I am privileged. I left my home having some security and support from my employer, but so many more had no such luck. And when I look at them - now I live in Armenia, a small country with only 3 million of its own people, the country that took in more than 100,000 refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh last autumn, and I, as many people, give some of my spare time to a charity that helps both them and Ukrainian refugees, - I see many things, but only rarely despair. They keep striving for life. They are all different of course, but I try to concentrate on those whose resolve and humanity could teach us all a lesson or two. Will they ever be back to their homes? Nobody knows. Same with those Ukrainians who found a refuge here. Their Odyssey has only just begun, and nobody knows what awaits them tomorrow, so there is no better time for your Odyssey than now. Tomorrow. September. We all need to know that there is hope for them and for the world. And this is what your books always do. They give home.

I finished a book last week. By which, I mean I finished writing one. Inasmuch as a writer ever dares say they\u2019ve finished. You stand back from the canvas, find yourself unable to resist a closing dab here and a final dot there, but at last, a voice says, \u201CIt\u2019s done!\u201D and that is that. Now comes the envoi \u2026 \u201CGo little book\u201D, as Chaucer, Spenser, and other poets liked to say - conjuring the image of the book as a doughty little boat that is set upon a stream to float bravely off into its future, now independent of its author.

This book of mine has simultaneously been the quickest to emerge from my pen1 and also the slowest. The quickest because it\u2019s taken the fewest hours in terms of actual composition, the slowest because of the unprecedentedly long time between having it set before me as a book I had to write and my eventual sitting down to it.

Put it this way: imagine that your first book emerged from you after three months of intense writing when you were 25 years old. Your second book took you twice as long\u2014six months\u2014when you were 28 years old. In reality, Book One took you twenty-five years to write and Book Two, three years. Which is to say, you were writing those books all the time before and in between the actual hours you sat at your desk2. Writing happens in the unconscious, in the hours trying to sleep, in the hours actually sleeping, in the hours listening to music, walking, playing with a yoyo or reading other people\u2019s books. It might even happen when you\u2019re watching TV, though I have a feeling less so than the foregoing pursuits \u2013 perhaps that is just the guilty echoes of those distant adult voices of my childhood, constantly accusing television of rotting the mind.

So, to my case (FWIW): I told my publishers the best part of five years ago that I was going to produce this book, the fourth and final volume in a series retelling Greek myths. The third volume, Troy, came out in 2019, and the idea was to give myself a year off and do my best to deliver number four, Odyssey, in 2021. You might think that the pandemic and its associated cascade of lockdowns from March 2020 onwards would have afforded me the most perfect opportunity to deliver the book early. But. Unlike many others, I was profoundly uninspired to write during Covid. Just couldn\u2019t bring myself to sit and do it. Don\u2019t know why. And when we were all finally allowed out, blinking in the sunlight, I was too keen to satisfy the other part of my professional life, performing this way and that on public stages of one kind or another, to turn my mind to writing. So the book, rather like its hero, Odysseus, was delayed and delayed on an Ogygia3 of abeyance and procrastination.

I sat down to concentrate on writing the whole book on March 2nd this year and flung down the final full stop on March 31st. To be completely square with you, I had already written two episodes - a fair section of what scholars call The Telemachy was done, as was Odysseus\u2019s arrival on Scheria and his meeting with Nausicaa.

We\u2019re working when we\u2019re not working. That\u2019s about the size of it. It\u2019s all so mysterious and out of our control that it makes more sense to invoke the presence of a Muse or Muses than to pretend it\u2019s all one\u2019s own achievement. I would invoke a Muse, of course, being a lover of Greek mythology, but you can adduce a djinn or genie if you prefer, or the elves in that fairytale who cobble the shoemaker\u2019s shoes for him at night while he\u2019s asleep\u2026 which is perhaps an allegory of the whole idea.

Elwood is a screenwriter, and he has been commissioned for a script, his first. The studio has set a deadline of two months. Seven weeks have passed now, and he is getting desperate. Every day, he sits at his computer and tries to type. But he isn\u2019t a third of the way in. Completely stuck.

Elwood stands, sits, kicks the walls. Goes for short walks. Goes for long walks. Nothing comes. He realises that he is either going to have to plead for an extension or pay back the studio\u2019s commission. The night before delivery is due, he sits in his armchair and stares malevolently at the computer. He knows he has to work all night at something, but instead, he falls asleep.

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