Coaching Is Not Just For Sports

    In sports activities, coaches encourage and assist children in developing the skills that enhance their player’s performance. A swim coach might take a student to the side of the pool to suggest an improved stroke.  A baseball coach tells his or her players to keep their eye on the ball. Parents are, in a similar fashion, their children’s coach when they listen to their child read and they become stuck on a word. Parents often inquire at conferences how they can support their child’s emerging reading skills. The following are prompts you can use to coach your child to use when they encounter difficulty.
 

Rather than tell your child the word, try one of the following methods to coach the use independent word recognition strategies...

• Picture prompt

  • Direct the reader to look at the picture.

  • Does the picture offer a clue offer a clue to the word?

• Rerun prompt

  • Suggest rereading the sentence or phrase to clarify the meaning so far. This can help predict the upcoming word.

• Context prompt

  • Ask the reader if what he or she just read makes sense.

  • Use this information to help the reader predict what words would “make sense’ or sound right in the sentence.

  • Then help the reader confirm the prediction with print.

• Read on

  • Beginning readers can be encouraged to skip over the unknown word and read to the end of the phrase or sentence, substituting a blank in place of the mystery word. This helps the reader to use context or the surrounding words and sometimes the initial letters to figure out the word.

• Comparing

  • Ask the reader if he/she has seen a word that looks like the troubling one.

  • Helping a child see that the word play can be useful in figuring out the words way or stay teaches them to use what they already know to decode new words.

• Structural prompt

  • Have the reader notice word parts

    • play-ing

    • out-side

  • Help the reader cover part of the word.

• Look back over previous text

  • Sometimes beginning readers recognize a word they’ve seen somewhere else.

  • Looking back and identifying the former context can help the reader remember the word.

 If your reader makes reading errors that do not change the meaning of the story, do not stop them.  Good readers who are fluent sometimes do this often.   For example, "I rode my bike (on) or (in) the street" does not change the message to the reader.

    If the reader is making many errors select an easier text (i.e.  more than 1 or 2 errors in twenty words).  A text that is too hard does not allow the child to profit from the experience or retain its meaning.  They also become frustrated with the text and aggravated with the act of reading.