The more time that children practice reading, the more skilled they will become at word identification. Practice is important, so find ways to encourage children to read a familiar book or story repeatedly. Have them read a story alone and read it to a friend and a parent. If you read a story to a child, stop throughout the text and have him state a known word and then point out that word on the page.
Phonics is an understanding of the relationship between letters and their sounds. When students encounter an unknown word, they can use phonics to decode it. Teach students to look for letter combinations that they recognize or parts of words that they already know. These strategies will help them to decode unknown words. When you read aloud, sound out and segment unknown words so that students can see your thought process and learn from it.
Successful readers can figure out unknown words by studying context clues. For younger readers, using context clues may mean looking at a story's pictures to figure out an unknown word. For older readers, context clues are other words in a sentence or paragraph. When you read aloud, model looking at the pictures to determine an unknown word. You also can demonstrate skipping a word, reading to the end of the sentence and going back to figure out the mystery word. Successful readers use these techniques when they read.
Choral reading occurs when a group of students reads a passage aloud together. Choral reading's benefits are similar to that of repeated readings. When students read as a group, they become more confident because no one hears their individual mistakes. To help students stay in unison during choral reading, display the text on an overhead projector and use a pointer to point out each word as they read. To add variety to choral reading, have girls and boys read alternating lines of a poem. Review poems or rhymes with repeated phrases and have children read these phrases while you read the body of the rhyme.