Any tips to encourage more accurate reading?

[diplodocus]

My DD is in Yr 1 and is doing fine with her reading (ORT level 7). She rarely comes accross a work she can't read or needs to decode, but quite often tends to read inacurately easy "joining" type words. For instance if a sentence said "The boy went on his scooter" she might read "a boy goes on a scooter". Doesn't matter sometimes, but can obviously affect the meaning of a sentence - she sometimes goes back and corrects herself. Does anyone have any tips to help her with this? It seems to help if she tracks the works with her finger , but am not sure if this is considered a good idea?

Sounds like shes doing really well and i think its quite common for them at this age to do this, I think tracking the words with her finger is a good idea and less likely to make mistakes we always use a finger or pen to track the words as my little one often thinks what word would be right rather than reading although she is quite low down with her reading, shes same age as your daughter but only on stage 1+

Getting her to track with her finger is a good idea. I used to use a piece of card with my son with a corner cut out. It stopped my son skipping ahead faster than he could read. Later on I used a ruler to help my son remember what line he was on.I think that child's eyes learning to track text is part of learning to read. My son used to miss out words or even skip lines.

If your child is guessing from the pictures rather than looking at the text it can sometimes help to cover up the pictures. Although my son used to hate this with a passion.

Do you think that your DD might benefit from using a slighly easier reading book to work on eye tracking? Maybe a book from a different reading scheme to avoid demoralising her or get her to pick an easy library book without too much text.

I think there a times when you want to work on stretcing vocab, times for challenging decoding skills and times for comprehension. ORT level 7 books are very demanding for a year 1 child.

Thanks for the ideas. Will maybe try card to stop her reading ahead (but should probably have a word with teacher first). I don't think an easier book would help -sometimes she reads much better than others so think it's a concentration thing, and it seems worse when she's interested in the book and "looking ahead" to see what's happening. I don't think she's using the pictures much anymore - jsut looking at "key words" and making up the sentence around them.