My 9-year-old son spells out unknown words when reading and so loses the momentum in reading. He does not get the true meaning of what he reads when he goes back to spell the word.

Guessing at words in a sentence is a common problem. Schools teach so much with sight word learning that it’s easy to understand how it happens. Children see and learn the word “heavy.” That gets stored in their memory, and then next time they see a word that starts with “h,” that looks about as long as heavy and has some of the same letters, instead of inspecting the word carefully, they guess at the closest word their memory can find, “heavy,” when the word might be “heart.”

Helping your child develop better word attack skills might help him. I like to play a little game in my class. I have a set of cards with letters on them. We pick a vowel, say “a”, put it in the middle and then pick a consonant to start with and a consonant to end with. Then we sound out the word. Next we change the beginning consonant and we sound out the word. We then change the ending consonant and sound out the word. Notice that we’re not playing this game in the context of a story. We’re just working on attacking the words as they are shown on the cards. You can begin with simple words, and increase the complexity as they are able to read more difficulty words.

When he is reading a story and misreads a word, have him go back and attack the misread word. The more you play these sort of word games, the better his sounding out/attack skills will become and the more confident he will become in venturing to sound it out instead of guessing with a similar looking word.

You are right in noticing that the more he has to stop and correct words, the comprehension level drops dramatically. If he misreads a word, and can’t figure it out the second time, tell him the word and have him move on with the story. It can become so frustrating for a child to have to ponder and attack every word. Work on attacking words during the game, not during the story. Have him sound it out once, and if he can’t get it, you tell him the word and move on.

Have him stop every few pages and tell you what’s going on with the characters in the story. Ask him questions about what is happening. This will help him retain and comprehend what he’s reading. Some beginning readers are working so hard on just figuring out the words that the plot is totally lost on them. A good tool here is to have them only read a few short pages, tell you what’s happening in the story, and then stop. Later, read a few more pages, talk about it and stop. Breaking the story down into short bits is a good way to help a beginning reader still feel good about being able to work through the words, and still remember what they have read.