Your child will learn to be able to recognize repetitive text in books. This pattern helps them to learn their sight words and practice their fluency. When coming across an unknown word, readers are encouraged to look at the picture for clues of what the story is about.
By "getting their mouth ready," readers are looking at the beginning sound of a word. Often when young readers use a picture to help them, they will say whatever they see in the picture. By looking at the beginning sound, readers can make a more accurate "guess" at what the word is. For example, if a child is reading a book about a playground and sees a slide and a swing in the picture, they can figure out which work it is by looking at the sl___ or the sw___ sound.
"Looking for chunks" allows emergent readers to find parts of a work that they know. It may be a word family, such as -at or -an. It could also be a small word in a big word, like in and to in into.
Readers are able to figure out words based on the theme or main idea of the story. For example, if a student comes across a word about space and sees the letter a in front of a long unknown word, they know the word will not be alligatorbecause in a book about space, there wouldn't be an alligator. They may be able to figure out, knowing what the story is about, that the word is astronaut.
Rereading is an excellent strategy for beginning readers not only to decode words, but also to foster comprehension. Readers are often so focused on decoding that they do not understand what is happening in the story. By rereading, readers are registering the word into their memory, as well as reminding themselves of the main idea of the story.
By "skipping the word, then going back," the reader is given the opportunity to see what occurs throughout the rest of the sentence. By doing this, they can think about what word would make sense in that place and go back to reread the sentence with the inserted word.