Student: "duh, eh, ef, ih, nah, ih, t. I don't know what it says."
Reading decoding for 3rd through 5th graders often sounds like this to me. They are frustrated and I'm ready to pull my hair out when they're stopping at every other word and isolating each sound in this way. Although students have been taught to look for chunks in the lower grades, those who still struggle with decoding in upper elementary usually isolate the sounds and have trouble blending them to hear a known word.
I heard about "BESTing a word" at a reading conference several years ago and I found it to be a great tool to get students to improve their decoding skills. By upper elementary, students have learned about syllables so helping them to sound out in syllables and repeatedly put the syllable pieces together gets to a more identifiable word. It, also, helps them with multisyllabic words that begin to show up in their textbooks and in standardized tests.
When I worked with small groups as a reading specialist, I started out every lesson with 2 or 3 words to "BEST" and after a while students began to do it on their own. I would write the word on the board and as a group we'd break it into syllables, examine each syllable, say each syllable in isolation and then combining the syllables repeatedly until the word was recognizable, and finally each student would use it in a sentence to make sure they understood what the word meant.
Here are bookmarks I made for students to keep in their reading folders:
