Fluency Frenzy
Reading with Automaticity and Prosody!!
Check out the Teacher Toolkit on your desktop for TONS of resources for teaching fluency!!
Why Fluency Matters
Research over the past four decades has shown that reading fluency is a main concern for many students who struggle in reading. A significant amount of students with poor comprehension can be attributed to complications in reading fluency. Furthermore fluency is a concern that goes well beyond the elementary grades. Techniques of instruction have been identified to increase students reading fluency and overall reading proficiency.
How Do I Teach It?
Strategies:
ALL of these strategies REQUIRE quality, timely, actionable feedback from the classroom teacher!
- Goal Setting and Self Assessment (WCPM)
- Graphing weekly reading progress (WCPM)
- Readers theater
- Repeated reading
- Echo Reading
- Shared Reading
- Partner reading
- Choral reading
- Self-recorded reading
- Whisper phone reading
- Scooping phrases
- Modeling fluent reading
When do I teach Fluency?
- 2nd graders should spend 30 minutes per day on explicit instruction in phonics and phonemic awareness, 70 minutes on oral language, vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency in CCLS text, and 50 minutes in dynamic flexible groups - working on guided reading, skills/strategies groups, word work, and fluency work.
- 3rd graders should spend 20 minutes per day on explicit instruction on phonics/phonemic awareness and word study, 70 minutes on oral language, vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency in CCLS text, and 60 minutes in dynamic flexible groups - working on guided reading, skills/strategies groups, word work, and fluency work.
- 4th and 5th graders should spend 30-45 minutes per week on explicit instruction in word work, 60 minutes in flexible small group instruction working on skills/strategies groups, guided reading groups (if needed), word work groups, and fluency groups, and 30 additional E/I minutes in Enrichment/Intervention which should be targeted to areas of need and growth.
- 6th graders should spend 30 minutes per week on explicit instruction in word work, 60 minutes in flexible small group instruction working on skills/strategies groups, guided reading groups (if needed), word work groups, and fluency groups, and 30 additional E/I minutes in Enrichment/Intervention which should be targeted to areas of need and growth.
If you need MORE time...for your targeted students...
- Pull these students (Tier I/Classroom Instruction) for an additional rotation specifically in fluency.
- Provide an additional intervention (Tier II or III) for targeted work in fluency intervention.
BUT please make sure that ALL service providers are clearly aligning their interventions and communicating...so that students aren't the ones connecting the interventions. It should sound like, "Just like Ms. O is working with you on these high frequency words, I am looking to see you apply those high frequency words in these texts..."