In sports activities, coaches encourage and assist children in developing skills that enhance their players' performance. A swim coach might take a student to the side of the pool to suggest an improved stroke. A baseball coach tells his or her players to keep their eye on the ball. Parents are, in a similar fashion, their child's coach when they listen to their child read or write and they are stuck on a word. To learn how to address this situation appropriately, parents often inquire at conferences how they can support their child's emerging and strengthening literacy skills.
Just to give you a little background information, books read independently by your child should be easy and pleasurable, not so difficult as to cause frustration. However, when reading a slightly challenging book with guidance, give your child a minute to figure out new words. Encourage the use of varied "word attack" (word identification) strategies when they encounter difficulty. "Sound it out" is not the only word identification strategy, nor, in many cases, is it the most effective way to word-solve while reading a text for meaning. Children should develop a repertoire of different strategies that they can use and interchange as the situation demands. Rather than tell your child a difficult word, the following are prompts you can use to coach independent word recognition skills when he or she encounters difficulty when reading or writing.
Picture Prompt
* Direct the reader to look at the picture.
* Does the picture offer a clue to the word?
Context Prompt
* Ask the reader if what he or she just read makes sense.
* Use this information to help the reader predict what word would "make sense" or
sound right in the sentence.
* Help the reader confirm the prediction with print.
* What makes sense there?
Read On
* Beginning readers can be encouraged to skip over the unknown word and read to
the end of the phrase or sentence, substituting a blank in place of the mystery word.
This helps the reader to use context clues or the surrounding words or letters to
figure out the word.
Rerun Prompt
* Suggest rereading the sentence or phrase to clarify the meaning learned so far.
This can help predict the meaning and identification of the upcoming, unknown word.
Comparison Prompt
* Ask the reader is he or she has ever seen a word that looks like the troubling word.
* Helping a child see that the word "day" can be useful in figuring out the words "play"
or "stay" teaches them to extend what they already know to decode new words.
Structural Prompt
* Have the reader look for know word parts:
* play-ing
* out-side
* Help the reader cover part of the word to ease his or her attention at reading word
parts or "chucks" as we call it in our classroom.
* Is there a small parts or cluster in the big word that you already know?
Reference Prompt
* Look back over previous text.
* Sometimes emerging readers recognize a word they have seen somewhere else.
* Looking back and identifying the former context can help the reader remember the word.
If your child still cannot figure out a word, after applying some strategies for a minute or so, tell him/her rather than allow him/her to become frustrated. If the reader is making many errors (i.e. more than two errors per twenty words), select an easier text. A text that is too hard does not allow the reader to profit from the experience of reading or retain an understanding of the text. Rather, they will likely become frustrated with the book and aggravated with the act of reading in general.
Praise all efforts as the reading experience should always be enjoyable.