Every child deserves the tools to become a confident and capable reader. This guide focuses on essential decoding strategies that support students through the complexities of reading. Below, we outline key strategies and activities that can be integrated into your classroom to support student success.
Phonemic Awareness
Develop the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes—the smallest units of sound in language.
Activity: Practice segmenting and blending sounds orally, using coloured blocks. Start with cvc words and slowly introduce consonant blends, digraphs, suffixes, etc.
Example: For 5 minutes a day, orally dictate 1 syllable words to your learners (e.g., clap). As your learner(s) to segment each sound slowly (e.g., /s/ /l/ /a/ /p/). Take it a step further by asking your learner(s) to delete the /s/ phoneme. Now the word is “lap”.
Phonics-Based Instruction
Connect sounds to letters and understand sound-symbol relationships.
Activity: Use multisensory techniques (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) to teach letter-sound correspondence. Start with individual vowel and consonants, then increase to blends, vowel teams, bossy r, etc.
Example: Trace consonant blends in sand while saying the corresponding sound.
Syllable Division
Learn rules for dividing words into syllables to improve decoding skills.
Activity: Teach syllable types (closed, open, silent-e) and practice dividing words according to the rules - Literacy Decoded has a step by step process for all 7 syllable types.
Example: Divide multisyllable closed syllable words such as rabbit (rab/bit), picnic (pic/nic), planet (plan/et). Divide open and closed syllable words such as robot (ro/bot), unit, (u/nit), program (pro/gram).
Decoding by Analogy
Use known words to decode unfamiliar words with similar patterns.
Activity: Identify word families and teach common spelling patterns. Start with basic cvc words and increase the difficulty when the students are ready and able.
Example: If a student knows "cat," they can apply that knowledge to read bat, flat, chat, etc.
Sight Words
Recognize that some words are not decodable and teach a memorization strategy to instantly to improve reading fluency.
Activity: Use Literacy Decoded’s sight word memory method to memorize words that don’t follow spelling patterns or words they are not ready to decode yet.
Example: Memorize common sight words like "the","said."
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