when you are casting off in the beginning of a row your a pretty much doing a bind off which is knit 1, knit 1 and pass the frist knit stitch over the second one and then you will be left with one stitch one the right hand needle, and when you are decreasing a stitch it will either be a left slanted or a right slanted decrease and one of the decreases are slip, knit, pass the slipped stitch over the knit stitch and that will make it one stitch less, and the other kind of decrease is a knit 2 stitches together. I hope that helps. These are the notes that I wrote for myself when I taught myself how to knit so that I would understand it better.