Tackling Tricky Words

In addition to every day practicing and improving our habits for independent reading and partner reading during reading workshop, 

we have been learning in our mini lessons some strategies for tackling tricky words:

We get lots of chances to try these out in our books when we all read. I love seeing a student look up from their book and silently inspect this chart for help as they read. I am hearing a lot less of "what does this say?" and seeing a lot more persistence and confidence in reading. I thought some of these tips might be handy for you to reference when you read with your child and they make a mistake or get "stuck." We all know some words can be sounded out-- or "tapped out" as we say in our Fundations word work-- but not all words can be sounded out, and for lots of situations it's simply not an efficient strategy. Students are seeming more empowered with a growing repertoire of strategies. And, all of these strategies are useful no matter what level of books your child is reading currently!

Things to try when you get to a word you don't know:

Check the picture: there is a reason beginning books have pictures-- to support young readers. It's a smart habit to check the picture, scanning each new page before reading it, as well as when encountering an unknown word, for clues. This won't always be enough, though...

Look at all the parts of a word: try breaking words into parts and then crashing those parts together. We've practiced this with some big, hard words in our books and we can do it. (Ex: st/omp/ing...stomping!) Also, this strategy reminds us to look through the whole word, not just the beginning. We can check endings we know like s, ed, and ing to be sure we are reading the whole word correctly: plays vs. playing vs. played.

Get a running start: sometimes with a tricky word, try just saying the first sound or sounds, like "al" for alligator, or "/h/" for have, then read the whole sentence smoothly up to that point, saying the first sound when you get to it, and thinking "what would start that way and make sense here?" ("The cow was in the f- ...field! The cow was in the field!") This one often works and is a favorite of many students. It particularly works for words that aren't clearly aided by the picture.

Double check: great readers can't just check the picture and guess, nor should they "karate chop" tricky words, saying each individual sound and forgetting what has been said and not knowing how to put it together. They need to think what might make sense in the sentence and the story, and make sure it looks right by checking the word. For example, a first, good guess might be "bunny" but upon double checking the word, first graders might realize it instead says "rabbit."

Try it 2 ways: We still have lots to learn about letter sounds and patterns and word parts in our spelling and word work lessons, but already first graders are aware that vowels can make more than one sound, both long and short, like the a sound in "apple" vs. the a sound in "acorn." This is one more strategy they can try when stumped on a word-- try a different vowel sound for the vowel(s) and see if that makes sense. Just being aware of this can help, especially if other strategies fail.

Students might be really good at some of these, and have as a goal to use others of these strategies more. 

Soon we'll be moving on to a reading workshop unit focused on skills for reading nonfiction texts, and we'll all be reading lots of nonfiction books on all sorts of topics at our own levels. But, we'll keep the "Solving Tricky Words" poster up for a while, as this will always be part of our work during reading time. :)