Decoding strategies

WHat kinds of things is she trying to decode, and what kinds of mistakes is she making?

She’s having difficulty in remembering short vowel sounds, reading multisyllable words (anything beyond one syllable) and many common sight words. Has trouble remembering rules of phonics and thus applying them to new words. Is in 2nd grade and reads on early 1st grade level.
Thanks so much.

I would get the book Making Words for her grade level. There are many great decoding strategies in these books. The activities are fun and you can help her transfer the strategies to her reading.
Strategies are:
looking for chunks or parts of the word that you know
using words you know such as part to figure out partner or WalMart for the same word
doing Guess the covered Word to teach onset (beginnings) and rimes (endings)
This activity helps use context clues to figure out what word works best in the sentence
hink pinks will help with rhyming and choosing the correct sound, symbo pattern for the word
The book has lots more
Sounding out is not a very effective strategy for unknown words. There are so many words that don’t fit
Have her say each letter out loud, then look for chunks of the word that she knows, stretch the sounds out into one another, use the sentence to help figure out the word and finally skip the word if she cannot figure it out. It might not be necessary fot the meaning of the sentence to be clear.
Nan

Unfortunately, phonics rules don’t always work. I think it’s far better to teach patterns, especially the ones that are quite consistent. For example, ai, ee, and oa are about 99% consistent whereas ea if very errant if we’re talking about two vowels together.

You might try building word families for some of the less regular patterns. Simply building families from color words as red, blue, yellow, green, orange, purple, black, brown, tan, white, pink and gray. Of course you won’t find any words which follow orange and purple but even this information is good because then one knows they are sight words. The same can be done with number words or words from segments of poetry, anything that can serve as a link to new learning.

You might also start a good developmental spelling program with her so she learns to build on knowledge she already has. Grace at

“Sound it out” is unclear if you don’t know the sounds!

Yes, phonics and sounding out works, but no, it’s more than individual letter sounds.

Get a good phonics book — many people here like Reading Reflex, but there are many good programs out there — and go over with her not just consonants, but also short vowels, long vowel pairs such as ay, ai, a_e, and so on, digraphs sh, th, ch, and ng, and diphthongs ou, ow, oi, oi, and the two common sounds of oo. (foot, boot). This is an ongoing process, teaching a sound every day or two for a few months.

At the same time you’re teaching her directly, help her read by modelling. She reads to you until she stalls on a word, and then after a second’s pause you give her the first consonant sound, pause, the consonant plus vowel, pause, first syllable, pause, and so on. By seeing how you “chunk” the word into parts and how you blend the known sounds together, she will understand what sounding out means and how it can help her. By reading lots and lots together with you, she gets practice on fluency and comprehension and develops vocabulary.

This combination really works, I promise from experience. Ask for more details any time.