Teacher as Coach

I thought that the articles for this week were very interesting.  It seems like an age old thing to tell students to "sound it out," however the articles and the book gave me a considerable amount of insight into how much work actually goes into the instruction of teaching phonics and spelling patterns.  It takes a lot of practice for teachers to be able to coach students to sound out words effectively.  The Clark article "What Can I Say Besides 'Sound it Out?'" gave some really good suggestions as to how to help students who are struggling with certain words.  One good example of this would be the word "wind."  When a student comes to this word and struggles, instead of saying "sound it out" a teacher could ask what they already know about the word, "in" says in, so from there the student could independently figure the rest of the word out and use the same clues next time they stumbled upon a word they are unfamiliar with.
Teaching phonics could be made into something very fun in the classroom.  When I was in school we learned phonics on the computer, and that was not fun and required little effort on the students part, however teaching a class phonemic awareness could be a group effort and should be something the students look forward to.  The Yopp and Yopp article gave some ideas for the classroom that made phonics into fun games.  One thing I thought a classroom of young readers might enjoy was the section about the book "Tikki Tikki Tembo" where the students clap to the syllables of the characters names.  This is a very fun book and really calls for students to sound out the words because they are words we don't see much.
I have always known that phonics are important for young readers to understand, yet I have often pondered how to help a student read other than saying "sound it out."  These articles gave a lot of insight on alternative ways to help students.  Can you think of any other ways or techniques that might work in a classroom of new readers?
As future teachers we need to always cater to our students needs, this doesn't mean we give them all the answers when they are unsure, but rather lead and coach them into the right direction.