Decoding Strategies for Beginning Readers

These Decoding Strategies can help your beginning readers as they read decodable books!

Read more about using these strategies in my post, Reading Unknown Words from the Inside Out.

*This post contains affiliate links.
**You’ll find the freebie towards the END of this post. Scroll down and find the teal download button. Click on it, and the PDF should come right up for you.

6 Decoding Strategies for Beginning Readers

If your learners are primarily using decodable readers {like my free Short Vowel Word Family Books, the stories from All About Reading, the BOB Books, or any of the phonics books I mention in this post}, these visual helpers for decoding words will be super helpful to you and your reader!

When using decodable text with your readers, your learners can easily find the help they need to figure out words WITHIN the word itself. Instead of looking at the picture or using other context clues to figure out unknown words, we want them to zero in on the actual word.

These free visuals can help you teach your beginning readers how to do this. Use them as prompts and/or display the visuals to remind your readers as they come to unknown words within decodable texts.

Here are the 6 decoding strategies included:

Look at the whole. Not just part of the word. The whole word and nothing but the word. {Sorry. I had to add that last part in.}
Look for parts or chunks you might know. For example, do you know a digraph chunk like sh or a vowel team chunk like ee?
Put your finger under the beginning of the word. {Not the middle. Not the end.}
Move your finger from left to right.
Slowly stretch out the sounds and/or chunks in the word.
Blend the sounds together to read the whole word. {Need help with teaching blending? Read these tips about helping kids sound out words.}