"Sound it out!"

I can vividly remember reading with my parents when I was younger and stumbling across the words on a page. "Just sound it out like we've practiced before..." My parents always prompted me with this phrase, and up until reading this article I thought that it was a wonderful approach. However, the author doesn't seem to necessarily agree. The examples provided in the article show that many times when we ask children to "sound it out" we provide different means for them to overcome the battle of figuring out the word. For example, when the article talked about the child reading about the dragonfly-- she never actually sounded each syllable out, instead she came to the conclusion by looking at the picture. After reading this article I came to the conclusion that while sounding it out may be a good method at times, we, as future educators, must also implement other strategies to help our students become better readers.