•Blending   Ask them to ‘chop the word up’, using their hand to do this, perhaps pretending to be the ‘Karate Chopper’...  ‘sound it out’, e.g. kit – chen, and then ‘squeeze the sounds back together’, doing the action of squeezing with both hands.

A shorter version is just saying ‘put the sounds into your squeezer’...

•Compound word    If it’s a compound word they don’t know, e.g. ‘playground’, ask first if they can see the little words inside the big one.  If they can, ask them to say or sound out each word (see above) and then join the two words together to make the bigger word.  If they can’t do this, suggest you both ‘chop’ the compound word in half and put your thumb over the second word so they can work out the first one.  Once they’ve done this, help them if necessary with the first letter or letters of the second word to get the whole word.

• Tense endings   You can help them with present and past tense endings by saying ‘If there’s an ing on the end of a word, it usually means it’s happening;  if there’s an -ed on the end, it usually means it’s happened’.

•Word structure gives meaning  If it’s the right time to explain this, perhaps Year 2 onwards, picking a long word apart can really help children to see how the constituent parts of a word give meaning.  Start with a ‘base word’, such as a verb, play, and see how many words the child can build up, e.g. player, playground, playing (see above).  When prefixes crop up in a text, explain what they mean, e.g. un- or de- mean not, re- means again and pre- means before.

•‘Guess and check’   You could put your thumb over a word leaving just the opening letter or two letters (if it starts with combined sounds such as sh, th, tr, ch, etc).  Ask them to sound out the letter or letters, having first repeated the preceding words in the sentence to build up the meaning from the context and enable them to predict the unknown word by using the strategy of ‘guess and check’.

•‘Jumping over’    You can encourage them to ‘jump over’ an unknown word and read on to the end of the sentence, then go back and try to fill in the missing word having gained a lot of meaning on the way.

•Building up vocabulary before and during reading   Talking about the cover picture and the title will help the child with some of the vocabulary they will need, then asking them what they see in the pictures as you go along and helping them with new words and what they mean.  You could sometimes ask them to retell the story in their own words at the end to make sure they’ve understood what they’ve read.

If a child is tired or the text is a bit too difficult, but they’re motivated by the topic, you could read with them and stop when they’ve got up some momentum or read alternate sentences or pages.  Indicate where you are in the text by having your finger under the line.