Coaching Reading

Chapter 5 of Classrooms That Work made an interesting point about fluent readers coming across unfamiliar words.  Triremes means nothing to me, I've never seen it and I don't know what it means. Children learning to read have similar experience with new words, but their experience is uniquely different. They have a large bank of words that are familiar to them in spoken language, but unfamiliar in print. They are in a strange position to face a foreign word, take time and "sound it out" and then all the sudden they know what that word is, they know how to say it and they know what it means! I sounded out Triremes but still had no idea what it meant. I wasn't exactly reading because I wasn't getting any meaning.

Before reading and writing was automatic, someone taught you, or coached you. It took tons and tons of practice. What games can you remember playing in class with manipulating words?  I remember clapping out syllables, finding rhyming words, and categorizing words that have the same endings.  I remember doing these tasks over and over and over.

"Word recognition is a necessary but insufficient condition for comprehension: it alone does not guarantee comprehension but without it comprehension cannot occur"

-What can I say besides "Sound it out"? 

According to Kathleen Clark, there are many other things to say.  In the first two transcribed interaction from the classroom, "sound it out" wasn't used even once. 

what are some other good phrases to say instead of "sound it out"?