Decoding Teaching Resources

Build students' decoding skills with reading activities, printable worksheets and more teacher resources, all created by teachers for classrooms like yours.

This comprehensive collection is filled with resources aligned with both the TEKS and Common Core English curriculums, and each resource has undergone the Teach Starter teacher team's thorough review process. Download resources you know you'll be able to add to your lesson plans immediately!

New to teaching students decoding strategies? Read on for a primer from our teacher team, including a look at how this skill plays into early literacy development and tips to help your students build their decoding savvy!

What Is Decoding in Reading?

It's something you likely know, but we like to start from the top, so let's dig into the meaning of decoding in a reading context. (Just want some ideas? Feel free to scroll down to our collection!) 

Simply put, decoding is translating written words into spoken language.

Need a little more?

In early literacy education, decoding refers to the process of breaking words down into their individual sounds and then blending those sounds together to form recognizable words. As students build their skills, they are eventually able to decode — or read — increasingly more complicated written texts.

The process of encoding builds off of phonics instruction, understanding of sight words, pattern recognition and the use of context clues, helping students become fluent readers with strong comprehension skills.

Decoding vs. Encoding — What's the Difference?

When discussing decoding in early education, we typically talk about reading instruction. As noted above, we teach our students to decode — or translate — the written word into the spoken form.

Of course, we don't do this in isolation. Kids need to learn to encode too, and linking instruction of both has been shown to help students learn to be stronger readers and spellers.

So, what is encoding, and how does it differ from decoding?

In an educational context, encoding is the polar opposite, and we tend to use the term in regard to teaching kids to write. In its most basic forms, encoding involves learning to spell different words by representing the sounds with corresponding written letters.

In essence, instead of translating written words into speech, encoding means teaching our students to translate spoken words into written words.