Literacy Support At Home

Literacy Focus - Word Attack!

As your child progresses as a reader, they will need to decode less familiar, longer and more complexly spelled vocabulary. There are a number of ways that we can help support readers to develop their decoding skills and fluency when moving towards being an independent reader.  

Remind your developing reader to: 

• Look at the whole word to analyse meaningful parts, such as prefixes; suffixes and base words. Recognising the first and last parts of words and how they change the meaning or context of a word, can then allow the reader to focus on decoding (sounding) the base word. (Ie: displeasing – dis means the opposite/ please means happy with something / ing can indicate a verb or doing word in the present tense).

• Breaking multisyllable words into their syllables can help a developing reader focus on manageable parts. This can reduce guessing of the final syllable or the reader becoming overwhelmed / disengaged. A simple rule to begin with is: look for the first vowel, take the next sound and divide (each syllable must have a vowel/ vowel digraph or ‘y’). An example is expressed – ex/press/ed. The double ss makes one sound so it remains in the middle syllable OR typical – typ/ic/al. The y is the first vowel as it takes that role in the first syllable. 

• Encourage your reader to sound out the base word / single syllable – t/ea/ch. Then blend it back together. See news article in Term 1, Week 9 for more detail.
• After decoding the word together. Repeat the sentence fluently. Then repeat the individual word and discuss meaning, places the word may have been seen before and the context of the word (ie: past tense / word type / number of syllables etc).

Fiona Hall

Literacy Learning Specialist