Need strategies for decoding

His “point of breakdown is applying knowledge of sounds to decode.”

If I understand you correctly, this child is able to segment the sounds in words and you are looking for strategies to teach long vowel sounds. Why stop at just the VCE pattern? Why not teach him the spellings of the long vowel sounds according to their frequency? For example, long a is represented most frequently by a single a. This occurs in words of more than one syllable as pa-per, a-pron, etc. It’s second most frequent spelling is a_e, then ai, ay, ei, eigh, ea, and ey. The last four spellings, of course, involve a limited number of words. The ai spelling is almost always followed by a consonant. The ay spelling is almost always used at the end of a word or syllable. The biggest problem is going to be choosing between a_e and ai and most of these choices are meaning based. I’d approach this through teaching him to spell first. Once he understands the spelling patterns, this should help him with decoding. Grace

Hi Marilyn,
I like to use the “bossy e” strategy. silent e makes the vowel say it’s name. This way the rule can be appilied to every vowel. However, I do agree with Grace that teaching one rule or sound in isolation is less effective when teaching decoding. Many programs teach one sound or rule for a week and then go on to the next rule. What happens is that the child loses the skills when it’s not repeated over a long period of time.
I perfer an intensive program where several rules or sounds are taught together, with plenty of opportunity for practice in words, sentences and stories in a varitey of envioronments, (at home and in school). This way the skill becomes habituated and the child reads with more automacity.
Hope this helps.
Pam