Aha! You probably went back and read the title again! If you did this is one of the best ways to build fluency in children-rereading. There are many other ways to help your students gain fluency in their reading.
-partner reading
-rereading familiar stories or passages
-choral reading with the teacher
-poetry, songs, nursery rhymes
-build fluency with books at their independent level (not instructional, certainly not frustration)
-readers theater
-practice phrases (not words in isolation)
-read along with a tape
-use whisper phones
Do your students know what fluency is? They may think they that it has something to do with a timer and a cold reading but that is not fluency. Fluency is automatic, expressive, and accurate reading. (Thank you ,Tim Razinski PhD, for this simple explanation). To many children fluency is reading FAST. It’s up to us to explain, and model, what fluency is!
-record your students reading, let them listen to themselves (Audacity is a great program for this!)
-model fluent reading for your students
-explain that reading “sounds like a conversation”
-show them examples of fast reading with no expression, etc. so they can see that fluency is not just speed
-when choral reading, echo reading, or reading along with a CD show students what it means to match their voice
Fluency is such an important skill. It may at times get a bad rap because it is connected with timed testing. (Our district uses DIBELS. It’s a countywide mandate as well as a MiBlSi mandate.) But when you think about the components of reading words automatically, showing appropriate expression, and going at the right pace to read words right; it’s a no-brainer! Just as any skill we need to model it and teach it to our students!
Here are just some of the resources available to put fluency instruction into your daily practice:
Fluency Phrases
Reading A-Z has poetry, fluency passages, and nursery rhymes
Partner Read/Read to Someone Lesson
Poetry for Kids
Children's Poetry Archive
