“The wind shook the leaves.”
“Please wind the string around the card.”
Keep these two made-up sentences where you and your child can see them. Look at wind in each: all four letters, w, i, n and d, are unchanged. If your child uses the weather pronunciation in the string sentence, pause there together. Read the whole sentence aloud. The useful question is what wind means in this particular sentence.
Same letters, different meanings
In the first sentence, wind means moving air and rhymes with pinned. It’s the air that shook the leaves. In the second, wind means to wrap the string around the card, and rhymes with find.
The sentence helps us choose the meaning and pronunciation. Read each one together, helping with any surrounding words your child needs. Notice how shook the leaves describes what the moving air did, while string around the card tells us about wrapping.
You could trace a wrapping movement around your hand, or wind some string around a piece of card as you say the second sentence. Keep the written sentence beside you so you can point back to wind.
Try it in the sentence
If your child pauses over the different sound, an exchange might go like this:
Child: “Is that the same word?”
Adult: “It has the same spelling. Here it means wrapping the string, so it rhymes with ‘find’. Let’s read that sentence again.”
If either pronunciation or meaning is unfamiliar, you can give it directly. There’s no need for a string of questions while your child tries to discover a sound they haven’t heard before.
Reread the whole string sentence together, including the words after wind. If your child wants to compare, go back to the weather sentence and hear the different sound there. You can point to the same spelling as you say each version.
Keep the word in view
When your child works out an unfamiliar printed word, they need knowledge of letters and the sounds they represent. Understanding the sentence also draws on knowing what its words mean and how they fit together.
Here, wind is visible in full. Once both pronunciations are familiar, the sentence helps your child choose between them. That’s different from guessing an unfamiliar word from a picture or from what might make sense. Keep attention on the actual letters as you connect the word with moving air or wrapping string.
Then read the sentence once more with the meaning you’ve talked about, and return to the book. You can leave the conversation there. There’s no need to find more examples or turn the pause into another activity when you’re ready to carry on reading together.