Decoding Strategies + Reading Strategies

Aligned to the Science of Reading, these strategies provide prompts so students can concentrate on decoding strategies at a grapheme, word and sentence level. When children are learning to read, evidence-based reading strategies need to be explicitly taught and reinforced in the hope that this will eventually become an automatic process.

The reading strategies included in this set of posters are: 

• Mouth Ready – Get your mouth ready to make the sounds.
• Eyes Left – Start at the left, move across to the right.
• Blend Sounds – Glue sounds together, one to the next.
• Syllable Split – Split the word into syllables.
• Meaning Check – Does that make sense?
• Grapheme Gaze – Find each grapheme, saying the sound.

You will notice ‘Meaning Check’ has been included as a strategy. This is because reading for meaning is important – the point of reading is, after all, to make meaning! 

How to Prompt Students with Strategies During Reading

These classroom posters serve as a visual reminder to students that there are a number of reading strategies they can use when they come across an unfamiliar word. It’s important that we don’t encourage word guessing during reading. Word guessing isn’t helpful for students who are learning to read, and there are far better strategies that will equip our students with the skills they need to become confident readers. These include: 

• Looking at a word and getting their mouth ready to say the first grapheme.
• Starting from the left of a word and moving across to the right.
• Segmenting the word into its graphemes. 
• Blending the sounds together.
• Splitting larger words into smaller chunks by looking at the syllables.

Why not print these posters on a smaller size and create a flip book for each of your students to use during their reading sessions.

Before You Download

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