Use tactile, auditory and rhythm strategies to help your student decode unfamiliar words. Give her tactile letters, made of sandpaper or furry cloth, and have her form the word. Encourage her to say each letter sound in order while tracing the letters with her finger. Then have her read the word again tracing the letters with her fingers in the air as she reads. If she is struggling with stress in the word, say each letter with a light tap on the desk, leaving a space at syllable breaks. For example, "doorbell" would be "tap, tap, tap, tap," then a moment's rest, followed by "tap, tap, tap, tap."
Write the different segments of words on index cards. If your student is especially helped by tactile cues, trace the letters with glue and pour sand onto them. Once the glue is dried, your student can trace the letters in the segments. Add the prefixes or suffixes to the roots of the vocabulary words that you are studying. For example, an "ing" card can be added to many verbs. Once the root and suffix or prefix are combined, have your student clap for each syllable: once for "walk" twice for "walking." Encourage him to look for the prefix or suffix you are studying in other contexts so that he understands its function in language. This helps him predict the underlying meaning of new words within novel sentences and facilitates reading.
Explain that each sentence has at least a subject and a verb. Encourage your student to use familiar words and pictures to guess the general idea of the sentence and then to guess what type of word is missing. For example, if your student can't read the word "skipped" in "she skipped to school," have her read the words she does know. For each of the words she knows, have her place an index card identifying the appropriate parts of speech with bright visual cues for "nouns," "verbs" and "other words." In this case, she would use two "noun" cards but no "verb" card which gives her a clue that she is looking for an action word. This helps her make sense out of the sounds she combines as she tries read the unfamiliar word. It helps her narrow the field of possible words by giving her an active structure to the sentence and providing visual cues.
Spend extra time working on common irregular words such as "you," "is" and "are." Since regular decoding strategies won't work for these words, extra practice is often needed to turn them into quickly recognized sight words. Cut the letters out of sandpaper and have your student trace them, or have her write them in the air with her index finger. Both of these actions incorporate both a tactile and a kinesthetic component that supports learning. Some children also respond to forming letters out of modeling clay. An auditory component can be added by making up simple spelling rhymes and singing them to familiar tunes. For example, try "y, o, u, spells you" sung to the tune of "Bingo."