Watching our children develop as readers is an amazing process to witness. But as they learn to read there are many instances when they sort of freeze, not sure what to do next. They get stuck. This is the perfect opportunity for us parents to use reading prompts to guide our beginner readers in developing decoding strategies. We need to know how to help young readers help themselves so they can become independent, fluent readers.
What Most People Say to Beginner Readers
Think back to a time when your child got stuck during reading and asked for your help. What was your response? My guess it that you likely said, “Sound it out,” or you simply told your child the word, so they could keep reading. We all do this all the time.
I think we’ve been programmed to say, “sound it out” every time our child gets bogged down in reading. It’s quick and it’s easy. It doesn’t take much forethought. And we think it works.
Similar to the “good job” phrase we tend to overuse, “sound it out” can become a bad habit. We say it so much that we forget to ask ourselves whether it’s really effective.
Why Beginner Readers Need More Than “Sound it Out”
“Sound it Out” is Too General
“Sound it out” is not specific and can leave a child still wondering what to do. What does “sound it out” look like practically? It’s better to use a specific reading prompt that draws a child’s attention to individual letters and sounds, blends, word endings, etc that can help them decode the entire word.
“Sound it Out” is Limited
Another reason “sound it out” should not be our default reading prompt is that it doesn’t always work. Phonics is a fundamental component of reading, but it has its limits. If a child gets stuck on a word like “laugh” or “one,” he or she can get caught up trying to sound it out and lose the whole meaning of the story.
Your beginner reader may have little experience with certain sound and spelling patterns. This would make “sounding it out” a confusing and impractical strategy.
What Good Readers Do
If we want to help our beginner readers grow, we need to think about what good readers do. Reading is complex. It’s more than sounding out words. It’s about making meaning. Good readers use a variety of information, including structure, meaning, and visual cues to make sense of text. They monitor their own reading by using all those cues at the same time.
Unconsciously, they’re asking themselves three simple questions as they read: Does it look right? Does it sound right? Does it make sense?
Take a moment to think about your own reading behavior. Maybe during a read aloud you said a word that didn’t make sense, but on first glance it seemed right, because it had the same spelling pattern. You reread the sentence and fixed your mistake, because you realized what you read aloud didn’t make sense. As experienced readers, we’re on autopilot, unconsciously using structure, meaning, and visual cues simultaneously when we read.
Beginner Readers Need Reading Prompts to Practice Asking These Questions
Since our goal is to help our beginner readers help themselves, we need to have a language toolbox full of reading prompts to coach them effectively. Over time they will start asking themselves these questions before we can prompt them!
It takes careful observation when watching and listening to your child read. You need to know your child’s reading strengths and weaknesses. Knowing how to choose the most effective reading prompt to say and when to say it can be tricky, but it gets easier with practice. So if you try a prompt and it seems to go nowhere, don’t worry, just try another one.
Learning to use a variety of reading prompts is well worth the effort. You’ll stop saying “sound it out” every time your child hesitates or misreads a word. Because you have something more precise and useful to say you help your beginner reader learn to help herself. With time and effort, you’ll become a confident reading coach, and she’ll become a confident reader.
Reading Prompts to Guide Beginner Readers
Using the three simple questions good readers ask as a guide, we can build a repertoire of things to say that points to the structure, meaning, and visual information in any text.
Visual Cues: “Does it Look Right?”
This question draws a child’s attention to the letters in the word. Then she can use what she knows about phonics to decode the word. If she said the word “back,” but the word was “bake,” asking “does it look right?” will help her focus on the letter combinations. She can then use her knowledge of the “vowel-consonant-silent e” rule to fix her mistake.
Reading Prompts to Help Your Child Use Visual Information
- Do you know a word like that?
- Get your mouth ready (to say the first sound)
- Look for a chunk you know.
- You said ____. Does that look right?
- What could you try?
Structure/Syntax Cues: “Does it Sound Right?”
This is when the reader has to make sense of words in the context of sentences. Using what they know about how oral language sounds provides another helpful cue in reading accurately.
Sometimes a reader will substitute a word that may “look” right but doesn’t sound right. A child may read, “The cat climb the tree” instead of “The cat climbed the tree.” He neglected the word ending and didn’t think about whether what he said sounded like the way we talk.
Reading Prompts to Help Your Child Use Structure and Syntax
- Does that sound like a word you know?
- Read it again and think what would sound right.
- Can we say it like that?
- Is that how we talk?
Meaning Cues: “Does is Make Sense?”
Making sense of text is, after all, what reading is all about. Asking this question causes a child to use context cues and his background knowledge or prior experience.
Reading Prompts to Help Your Child Use Meaning
- Look at the picture and think what would make sense.
- Skip it. Then go back and reread.
- What word would make sense?
- Read it again and think what would make sense.
- You said ____. Does that make sense?
5 Helpful Hints for Using Reading Prompts
It’s tempting to jump right in and try to help, but providing wait time gives your child a chance to think about how to solve the problem by herself. If it’s hard to hold back, try mentally counting to five before you offer a strategy.
Give Positive Feedback When You Notice Your Child Using Particular Cues
Providing feedback helps your child feel validated as a reader. Reading is hard work. If you noticed your child reread and fixed a mistake because it didn’t make sense, tell him what you saw and praise him for working it out on his own.
Combine Cues to Help Your Child Learn to Self-Monitor
Combining cues, also referred to as cross-checking, helps your child learn to internalize the three basic questions. If your child fixes a problem using visual cues, ask her to reread the sentence to see if it sounds right. This is cross-checking with structure. Remember, good readers use all three sources of information, visual, structure, and meaning, to monitor their reading.
Tell Your Child the Word if Needed
If you’ve tried a couple of reading prompts to help your child figure out a word, but they are not successful, it’s okay to tell him the word. The idea is to use reading strategies quickly, so he can keep on reading. It’s not worth losing fluency and comprehension and causing frustration by spending too much time on one word.
Start With the Three Basic Questions and Let Them Guide You
Maybe you’re thinking that choosing from all these different reading prompts is too overwhelming. Don’t worry, it felt like that for me the first time too.
If you can train yourself to use the three basic questions first, the rest will fall into place. Knowing whether to prompt for meaning, structure or visual information is the first, and sometimes hardest part. Once you identify that, you can select other specific reading prompts to target what your child needs.
You may discover that all you needed to do was ask one of those three basic questions, “Does it sound right?” “Does it look right?” “Does it make sense?” And your child did all the rest!
Ready to Move Beyond “Sound it Out?”
I hope this post shed some helpful light on what to say when your child gets stuck during reading. Beginner readers need to hear more than “sound it out.” They need a variety of reading prompts to help them use all the information available in text.
To help you get comfortable with these beginner reading prompts, I’ve created a printable that you can get for free by joining my mailing list below. Print off a copy of What to Say to Beginner Readers, and refer to it when you’re listening to your child read. After a while you may not need it anymore!
