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If you don't want to print all the pieces, use with the dry-erase pockets.

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You are welcome to print copies for non-commercial use, or a limited number for educational purposes, as long as credit is given to Reading Rockets and the author(s). For commercial use, please contact the author or publisher listed.

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What Are Decodable Books and Why Are They Important?

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Decodable books play an important role in phonics instruction and building confidence in young readers. Learn more about decodable books, how they differ from predictable texts, and how to select high-quality texts that align with the scope and sequence of your phonics program.

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Lesson Slides, Decodables, Games, Lesson Videos, Progress Monitoring Tools & More.

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The Writing Revolution by Judith Hockman & Natalie Wexler

Best Practices in Writing Instruction by Steve Graham, Charles MacArthur and Michael Hebert

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When and how to teach high frequency words

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High Frequency/Heart Word Scope & Sequence

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Guided Phonics + Beyond Nonsense Word Strips FREEBIE.pdf

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Understanding the How and Why of Sound Walls

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Advanced Spelling Screener Scoring Sheet

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Advanced Spelling Screener Scoring Sheet

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The Kastner Collection: Best Practices for Teaching High Frequency Words

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This curated collection is comprised of professional learning presentations, video clips, professional learning resources, and instructional routines and resources to teach high frequency words aligned with the science of reading. This Wakelet will have ongoing updates. You may also access every Wakelet from the Kastner Collection at this link: https://wke.lt/w/s/mcU0bZ

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 Fluency Sheets (letters, cvc, digraphs, etc)

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 Fluency Sheets (letters, cvc, digraphs, etc)

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Copy of PA-Adding Beginning Phoneme Book 13

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Blachman, B. A., Ball, E. W., Black, R., & Tangel, D. M. (2000). Road to the code: A phonological awareness program for young children. Baltimore: Brookes.

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction (NIH Publication No. 00-4769). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

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Elkonin boxes are used to build phonological awareness skills by having children segment spoken words into their individual sounds (phonemes). To use Elkonin boxes, a child listens to a word and moves a token into a box for each sound or phoneme.

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Hello! In today's episode, I had the honor of speaking with Dr. Tim Rasinski. If you know anything about reading fluency, you have probably read something that he's written.

He is a professor of education at Kent State University and directs its award-winning reading clinic. He's written over two hundred articles and has authored, co-authored, or edited over fifty books or curriculum programs. In addition, his research on reading has been cited by the National Reading Panel and has been published in many journals. But more than that, Dr. Rasinski is about the art of teaching, not just about the science, but how to apply it in artful ways. We'll get started right after the intro.

Anna Geiger: Welcome, everybody! Today I'm very excited and honored to be interviewing Dr. Tim Rasinski. If you know anything about reading fluency, you've heard of him and probably read at least one of his books. He has been in education for years, given us lots of articles and books and webinars. Today, he's going to talk to us about reading fluency and what we can learn from the research. Welcome!

Tim Rasinksi: Hi, Anna! Glad to be with you. Thanks for setting this up!

Anna Geiger: Can you talk to us a little bit about how you got into education, and then what led you into studying fluency, and then where you're at today?

Tim Rasinksi: Oh boy, that's a long story because I've been at it for a while.

Actually, my college degree is in economics. I had this aspiration to be a, I guess, a businessman, a banker, something like that. But at the time I was in the service, and when I got out of the service I worked in a bank for a while, and I had friends who kept telling me, "You know, you work with kids pretty well. Why don't you think about being a teacher?"

Well, I come from a family of teachers, and I know how hard they work, and I said, "I don't want to work that hard!"

But nevertheless, that's what happened. So I used the GI Bill to become a teacher outside of Omaha, Nebraska. I taught elementary, the middle grades, and was a reading specialist for several years.

Actually it was there that my interest in fluency was developed. I was working as a Title I reading interventionist, and I'm working with these kids who, by definition, are having difficulty with reading, and I'm doing everything that the book tells me to do. I'm working on phonics and phonemic awareness and vocabulary and reading comprehension. Most of the kids I was working with did pretty well, but there were some that I just couldn't budge off the dime.

Fortunately for me, I was working on my master's degree at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. So if there's any Mavericks out there, it's a shout out to you guys. But the professors had us reading some of these articles that were just beginning to appear on reading fluency.

I'm not even sure I knew what fluency was at the time, but I read these articles. One was called "The Method of Repeated Readings" by Dr. Jay Samuels from the University of Minnesota, another one by Carol Chomsky, "After Decoding: What?" After you teach kids to decode words, but they're still not making any progress, her answer was reading fluency. So I read these, as well as Dick Allington's piece, "Fluency: The Neglected Reading Goal."

Anyways, what happened was I said, "Okay, well, I'll give this a try," and I tried out repeated readings and assisted reading with the students I was working with, and, lo and behold, they began to make progress. In some cases, it was pretty breathtaking. In other cases, it was more muted, but it was there.

And so I jumped on that bandwagon, started my PhD work at Ohio State, and met up with my advisor, Jerry Zutell, who also had an interest in reading fluency. We've worked together over the years, but that's how it got started, actually, as a very practical problem, working with kids who are having some difficulty in reading.

So I got on it forty-plus years ago, and I'm still at it. I'm still trying to discover more things about fluency and why it's important.

Now I do research. We just did a study that got published in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy about fluency in adults.

But what I really see myself as is a person who bridges research into practice. I think we have a huge need for that in our field. It's one thing to have the basic research into literacy, but then how do you actually apply that in the classroom? That's what I call the art. We're in this age now of the science of reading, but there's also an art of reading as well. It's that blend. That's where I kind of see myself positioned, not only my own research, but the research by other people, and trying to translate that for teachers who are in the trenches.

Anna Geiger: Yes, that is extremely appreciated. I think a lot of teachers, myself in the past included, see researchers and they think, "Well, what do they know? They've never been a teacher." For people to hear that many researchers were actually in the classroom, and still have a foot in the classroom, is good. And especially, we appreciate the bridging, too, because for teachers, reading those big, complex articles may not be what they want to do after a long day in the classroom.

Tim Rasinksi: Right. And in many cases, the research that we do is under such controlled circumstances, that it doesn't even begin to approach what teachers find in the classroom. So we need that, those folks who bridge both positions and try to translate that for teachers, because you're right, many teachers just don't have the time to dig into those 30, 40-page studies. And so it's up to me and my colleagues like me to kind of pull out those nuggets and talk about, "This is the way it can be done." And I think we need more of those folks.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, for sure. Speaking of those nuggets, what would you say, for the average teacher, what are the big takeaways from research for teaching reading fluency in the classroom?

Tim Rasinksi: Boy, I could go on that this one for quite a while.

First of all, the idea that reading fluency is not a uni-dimensional construct. It's actually made up of two subcompetencies. One, everybody knows about, we call it automaticity in word recognition. It's the ability to recognize words so automatically that when a reader is reading, they're not really paying all that much attention to the words. They're recognizing those words automatically, and so all their mental attention can be devoted to where it really matters: comprehension.

I teach a course here at the university on phonics, and one of the first things I tell my students is, "The goal of phonics instruction is to get students not to use phonics."

Anna Geiger: Yes.

Tim Rasinksi: As adults, we don't use phonics hardly ever, maybe once in a while, but most of the words we encounter are basically sight words. They're up there in our heads, and it's just a matter of seeing the word and instantly accessing it, not only the sound, but the meaning, and then applying it to comprehension. So that's one thing. Most people know about that because they're familiar with the way we measure automaticity, it's usually the speed of reading. How many words per minute can you read correctly?

But there's this other part. I often call fluency a bridge between word study and comprehension. Automaticity is part of that bridge that links to word study. But the other part that links to comprehension is what we call prosody, or I would prefer to call it expression.

If I think about somebody who's a fluent reader, it's not somebody who reads fast, but it's somebody who uses their voice to make meaning. They get loud and soft and fast and slow. They have dramatic pauses. They phrase the text into meaningful units. We know that that's a big part of fluency as well. What the research is pretty clear on is this: students that read orally with good expression, when they read silently they tend to be our best comprehenders. And this is across all grade levels.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, again, getting back into the basic research, in 2019 they did a study on that with fourth graders. They found that there is a relationship, kids that read with greater expression, enthusiasm, even joy, if you will, they tended to be better comprehenders as well. So it's both of those things.

What happens is sometimes we get overly focused on that automaticity part, that the expression part gets neglected.

I was just chatting with a teacher earlier today and yesterday about this where her school has a goal for all kids in her grade level, I think it was third grade, to read at a particular speed at different points in the year, and the kids are actually graded on speed. She was kind of concerned about that because how can I develop prosody if I'm trying to get my kids to read as fast as possible?

You can't. I mean, when you're focused on speed, the rest of it goes by the wayside, even the comprehension part. I'm just trying to go from part A to part B. I have a friend, Chase Young, who calls this NASCAR reading.

We had a couple kids in our reading clinic just a few months ago, second graders, that came to us because they were experiencing difficulty. And so what we do is we have them read a couple of passages for us, and of course we try to analyze what's going on. Both of these kids looked up at the clinician who was working with them at the time and said, "Am I supposed to read this as fast as I can?"

Where's that coming from? Yeah, it's coming from all of this, and I'm not putting down teachers. These are well-meaning teachers trying to do the best, but it really doesn't work.

We want kids to be fast readers, but we want them to become fast the way that you and I became reasonably fast readers, and how was that? We just read a lot. You practice, and you become more automatic, and the speed just shows up. But you also learn how to modulate the speed ... slower here, faster here, and that metacognitive awareness of reading fluently.

So those are the two main things, this two-dimensional part of it. Then let's talk about the way that we teach reading fluency.

I like to think that there are three basic components. One is that we want to model fluent reading for kids. We want to read to kids, and when we read to kids, not only talk about what we've read, but talking about HOW you've read it, if you're the teacher. Did you notice how I changed my voice when I became a different character? So the kids developed that awareness of what prosodic fluent reading is like.

The second part is what I call assisted reading. That's where a student is reading something, but they're hearing it read to them at the same time in a fluent matter. It could be done in a variety of ways. This could be working with a group, choral reading. It could be reading with a partner. It could be a parent or a teacher or even a classmate who's a somewhat better reader than them. It could be reading and listening to something that was prerecorded. The most unusual one is something where a captioned television has been suggested as a way to develop that assisted reading, because when you watch captioned TV, you're seeing the words on the TV and you're hearing them at the same time or close to the same time. It's not exactly the best reading, but it is reading. When we're talking about kids who are having difficulty, we want to cast as wide a net as possible. Any opportunity to get kids in front of words is certainly worth it. So that's the second part, assisted reading.

Then the third part is practice, but there's two kinds of practice.

The most common kind of practice is wide reading. Dick Allington writes about that a lot. We know that kids who read the most tend to be our best readers, so we want to get kids into reading one thing after the next. That's what I usually define wide reading as. I read one book, then the next, and the next, and the next.

But we also have this thing called repeated reading. That's where we ask kids who are, again, not-so-good readers to read something multiple times until they reach a point where they can read it reasonably well. They begin to approximate what a good reader does.

What we have learned is that when that is done ... I mean this is what Dr. Jay Samuels found years ago. When kids do that, of course they get better on this piece that you practice over and over again because practice makes perfect. But the key is, when they then move on to a new passage, something they've never seen before, something that's even more difficult than the one they just practiced, we find improvements there as well. There's a sense of generalization there. That's something we want to build into our instructional approaches.

So the key is, and again, here's sort of the art of it, how do teachers do this? How do teachers do the modeling, the assisted reading, and the repeated reading to develop fluency with our kids?

What often happens is we do the repeated readings to increase reading speed. Read this five times until we can read it at 120 words per minute.

To me, I call that fake fluency. Where, in real life, do people practice a text to read it fast? The only thing I can think of is those drug commercials we hear on the radio where they list all the bad things that are going to happen to you if you take this particular medicine or drug.

Okay, so those are the things. Now, may I continue? I'm kind of dominating the time here.

Anna Geiger: Of course, of course!

Tim Rasinksi: See, this is where the art comes in. The science of reading fluency tells us modeling, assisted reading, and repeated reading. But how do you actually get kids into this?

Now we see all this timed reading stuff, and that's adhering to the science. But the art is this: why would anybody want to engage in reading a text multiple times?

The artful answer, to me, is performance. If you're going to be in a play, if you're going to sing a song for an audience, if you're going to recite a poem for a poetry slam, you have to rehearse. What is rehearsal? It's repeated readings. It's not repeated readings to read fast. It's repeated readings to reach a point where you can read that text with adequate speed but also appropriate expression and meaning so that an audience would find what you're reading satisfying and meaningful for them. That's the art.

So the question then for me is, are there certain kinds of texts that are meant to be performed orally? That's where we come into things like song, poetry, reader's theater, a lot of these kinds of texts that many of us grew up with. I grew up with poetry, and songs, and putting on plays. Now it doesn't seem like we have the time for that kind of stuff, and I think we should find it because the nature of poetry itself is so rich. It's rich with meaning and metaphor, and that should be part and parcel of our reading programs.

Also things like, well, lots of texts, and I don't want to overdo it, but even things like oratory or speeches from American history. In November is the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, so I will have students in our reading clinic rehearse and perform at least portions of Mr. Lincoln's speech, "Four score and seven years ago ..." But the goal is to learn to read it with that kind of expression that perhaps Abraham Lincoln did. That requires rehearsal.

That's the art. We're taking the science, and not dismissing the science, but finding a way to apply it in artful ways. That's why I often say teaching is so difficult because you have to be both an artist and a scientist. If you want to be a scientist, you go to laboratory and do your work. If you want to be an artist, you go to your studio. But if you want to be a teacher, you've got to do both of those things, and that's a challenge. That's a challenge that we all struggle with.

Anna Geiger: I'm sure teachers will appreciate that you have acknowledged that for them because we all know that's true.

Tim Rasinksi: Oh yeah, I mean there was a time when I would work in classrooms, sub occasionally, just to kind of keep my toe in the water, but I got to the point where it was just too hard. It's difficult. I love going into a classroom and spending an hour or so, but I've got such respect for teachers who spend day after day in the trenches. And when I say in the trenches, I don't mean that disparagingly. It's tough, really tough. And it's so sad to hear negative comments that we hear now from the media or from other folks about teaching. Teaching is not easy to do.

And yet the future of our country, the future of our world, is in the hands of teachers as well as the parents.

Anna Geiger: Absolutely. Yes, they're partners.

Now you alluded to this a little bit at the beginning when you talked about reading just to read fast, but any other mistakes that you've seen when teachers are trying to teach fluency or mistakes to avoid?

Tim Rasinksi: Well the other thing I would say would be to look at those kinds of texts because in many of the programs. I won't name any of them, but in our work on fluency with kids, what they're asking kids to read repeatedly are informational texts. And I have nothing against informational texts, they're really important. But did you ever try to read informational text with expression? I mean, basically you're conveying information, and it doesn't lend itself as easily as what I just mentioned, poetry and song and a reader's theater script, or when kids are performing a short play. So try to keep that artfulness there, that notion of reading with expression in the kinds of texts kids read. And find ways to make it every day.

Tim Shanahan, I'm sure you're probably familiar with his work, was at one time, several years ago, the director of reading for the Chicago Public Schools. He mandated that fluency be taught every single day using many of these techniques that I just mentioned, all the way through grade 12. What he found was that the overall reading proficiency scores went up in the Chicago schools in the time he was there, and he attributed it largely to the work on fluency that was demanded.

The thing is, fluency often, like Dick Ellington said, was the neglected goal of the reading program. And to some extent, it still is. We did a study a couple years ago where we asked elementary teachers to identify how much time per day they devoted to phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. What we found was that fluency was the one that had the least amount of time devoted to it.

So we need to, of course, find time for fluency. And then what do you do during that time?

Now in our reading clinic, we actually use a lesson, we call it the Fluency Development Lesson. Keep in mind, we're working with kids who are having difficulty in reading. Our goal is for our children to feel successful in reading every single day. I want these kids to leave our clinic, go up to their moms and dads and say, "Mom, I can read something that I couldn't read at the beginning of the lesson." Well, what can you learn to read? Something not terribly long, so a song lyric, a poem, maybe a short passage from a story, or whatever.

But then we go through this process. This is a twenty-minute lesson where it begins with the teacher reading the text to the kids. They follow along silently, and they might actually read it a couple times like that. Then they read it together, chorally, teacher and students. Then the kids practice with a partner and eventually they end up performing it. You might have a parent sitting outside the classroom, and the children go up there and they perform for the parent, and the job of the parent is just to give the kids a big hug and tell them what a great job they did. Every day these kids feel have accomplished something.

How often do our kids who struggle in reading not have that experience? They work hard. Teachers work hard. But did they ever feel that tangible success of actually conquering a text. In our reading clinic, we actually find that happening. And then when we pre and post test the children, we find they're making exceptional progress, not just in fluency, but actually overall reading. Word recognition improves. Fluency improves. Comprehension improves as well.

Until we can make fluency just as integral a part of our classroom instruction, I'm going to be on my soapbox and talking to good folks like you about how important fluency is.

The other thing I'll mention ... you got me going here, I can't stop now.

Anna Geiger: That's okay!

Tim Rasinksi: Most of our state standards identify fluency as a goal, but it's usually grades K through five or one through five. But what happens when kids leave fifth grade and they're not adequately fluent, sufficiently fluent?

It becomes an albatross because our middle school teachers and high school teachers may not be trained in fluency. We've actually done research that finds that you take a look at most of the kids in high school who are having difficulty with reading, and it's usually reading comprehension, but when you strip it away a little bit, what you find is fluency is a huge problem. They read excessively slowly in that word-by-word manner. There's no expression, no joy in their voice. Of course, as a result, comprehension suffers.

So this is a message that needs to go beyond just fifth grade, into middle school and high school, because we have kids that slip through the cracks and would benefit from that kind of instruction.

Anna Geiger: I remember way back when I was doing my master's degree, we had to help some kids during the summer. I was with a BIG boy, he was like, I don't know, six feet tall, and I'm five foot two, and he was reading about like a second grader. We did some fluency poetry reading where I would read a line, then he would read a line, and when he first read a line really clearly, he just was so excited in his eyes. He was like, "That was tight! I read a line. And it sounded really good."

Tim Rasinksi: Right. I know. I know! That convinced him, "I can do something."

One of the things we built into our clinical program is that kids actually, once you learn how to do it, that's not good enough. Now you have to perform it, perform for your classmates, and perform for Mom and Dad when you go home so that they have that chance to show off.

It's just like a musician, they practice things repeatedly, but there's a purpose. That purpose is the eventual concert, the eventual performance there.

And again, yeah, you're right. I mean to see a sixth grader read The Cremation of Sam McGee, "There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold." To hear those kids read like that, it's so heartwarming because, otherwise, these are the same kids who previously would mumble read. They're so ashamed of their ability to read that they'd just kind of mumble in that staccato-like fashion. We want readers who are enthusiastic and see meaning in print.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. Well speaking of having a set time of the day where you work on fluency, I mean I think obviously that's going to be different in kindergarten and first grade where in kindergarten you're working in fluency with sounds and individual words, and then that builds from that. But I can see when students are starting to read more fluently, like second grade, having a period where you do work on fluency. I'm going to write a blog post about the fluency development lesson, because I've read a lot about that, and it just seems very doable for a classroom teacher. It only takes like fifteen minutes a day, and you do something new every day, lots of things.

Tim Rasinksi: Yeah. Exactly.

Anna Geiger: Do you have any other tips for teachers if they really want to have that block of time trying to build fluency for their students. Perhaps the fluency development lesson or putting in reader's theater? Any other ideas?

Tim Rasinksi: Well, you said something that I slightly disagree with. I mean, K-1 you're working on words and phonics, and clearly you are, but that doesn't mean you have to give up on reading fluency. One of the easiest things to do is find a nursery rhyme or a poem or a song and make sure the words are in front of the kids and sing it chorally at the beginning of every single day through the course of a week or so. And then once the kids basically get it memorized, then let's start looking at the individual words within this text. Let's look at the sentences. Look at the words. Let's break the word down into its onset and rhyme. Let's think of other words that have that rhyme in them.

So it's actually the way I taught my four kids how to read. We sat down side by side, and we would do nursery rhymes and poems, and that was a big part of it. And we were able to dig into phonics, but it wasn't ... Typically, we think in terms of phonics going from part to whole. Let's learn the letters, then the sounds, which is fine, but why not go the other way too? Let's read the whole text first, and really get good at it. Then let's analyze it for its various elements.

Anna Geiger: So make time for that explicit phonics instruction, but also put shared reading into your day?

Tim Rasinksi: Exactly. Exactly.

Anna Geiger: Because it also builds prosody, which they can't get from their decodable text yet.

Tim Rasinksi: Exactly. And we're talking five to ten minutes a day. But if you have that daily song, you could do it right at the beginning of the day, right before lunch, after lunch, or at the end of the day. It is joyful. It's so neat to see kids sing. Brain scientists tell us that one of the reasons we love to sing is because it makes you feel good, and we ought to be bringing that kind of joy into our classrooms.

I gave a talk several years ago. It was actually in New York City, and we started a lecture to teachers with some songs about New York. "I'll Take Manhattan, and Staten Island, too." The following April, I received an email from a teacher who had attended that workshop. She was a first grade teacher, and I'll just give you her first name, Becky.

She wrote to me, and she said, "I started singing with my first graders. What we would do is learn two or three songs over the course of a week, children's songs that we all grew up with. And on a Friday we'd have a hootenanny or a sing-along. Then the next week we'd have a couple of new songs to learn." She called it joyful learning.

Well the reason why she wrote to me in April was she said, "Every one of my students is reading at grade level, AND they love to sing." And she said, "That had never happened before where every kid was reading at grade level!" And she said, "The only thing we did differently was brought in these songs."

And the neat thing I'll throw in about song and poetry is that they're easy to learn. The rhythm, the rhyme, and the melody just make them so accessible.

I mention this as a resource if anybody's interested. I have a website, it's called timrasinski.com. If you click under Resources, I've put several of the articles that I've written over the years. One of those articles is with that teacher. I guess I should give you her last name, it's Becky Iwasaki. She's a first grade teacher from Danbury, Connecticut, and she and I actually wrote an article for The Reading Teacher right after that, talking about how she was able to bring this into her classrooms and the results that she had.

Anna Geiger: I know you've written, I don't know how many books you've written, I have most of them, I think. I think a recent one is "Artfully Teaching the Science of Reading" with Chase Young?

Tim Rasinksi: Yes, and if I could give you a little bit of background to it.

Anna Geiger: Sure.

Tim Rasinksi: It started because I have two colleagues, Dr. Chase Young and Dr. David Paige, and last year, Reading Research Quarterly did a special issue on the science of reading.

We thought to ourselves, "Well, how about if we do one on the art and science of teaching reading?"

We focused primarily on reading fluency, and it got published. They accepted it.

Then what happened was I guess a publisher contacted Chase Young and said, "Well, are you interested in maybe turning this into a book form?" And so we did. It came out in April.

What we did was basically took The Big Five from the National Reading Panel, phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension, and we devoted a chapter to how can these scientific concepts be taught in artful sorts of ways?

So it's not just the fluency and rehearsal. We talk about ways that you can teach phonics through things like daily word ladders. Or you can teach vocabulary through Latin and Greek morphemes or word roots and having kids invent words. We really like the book. It's gotten a really nice reception from those teachers who recognize the science, but realize there's something else that's missing, and the thing that's missing is the art. And so we try with this book to give teachers permission to be that artful person. Too many times these programs that we now have for teachers are so prescriptive. There's no room for individual creativity. There's no room for students to become creative. I think we're really missing a lot when we hamper teachers in that sort of way.

Anna Geiger: Agreed. Because people that become teachers, in general, are creative people.

Tim Rasinksi: Exactly.

Anna Geiger: That's why they became a teacher, to be creative. So I think there's a lot of value in those explicit programs, but teachers have to be able to bring creativity and, like you said, art to their teaching.

Tim Rasinksi: Right. Because every one of us, we're different in our style of teaching. Every one of our students, they're different in the way they learn, of course, in their needs as well. And who else knows that than the teachers themselves? So one size does not fit all for sure.

Anna Geiger: For sure. Well, in all the books that you've written, particularly the one you just wrote, but are there any other ones that you would like to highlight before we close for today?

Tim Rasinksi: There's one that's on fluency that's getting a lot of attention. It's called "The Megabook of Fluency," written by myself and a fifth grade teacher from out of Phoenix. Her name is Melissa Cheesman Smith. I had written a book previously called "The Fluent Reader," which is more a kind of an academic book, a research-in-a-practice book. But this book, "The Megabook of Fluency," is very practical. The idea is that it's just chapter after chapter of things that can be put into the classroom tomorrow. So that would be the one I would recommend. It's gotten great reviews on Amazon. I believe it won of the Teachers' Choice Award in 2019. So I mean, that's like the Academy Awards for educational books.

Anna Geiger: Oh, cool.

Tim Rasinksi: Another thing that I often work on is what you call foundational reading, so phonics and vocabulary. I have several books out there, and they're not really academic books, they're books for teachers and kids to use. They're called "Daily Word Ladders." I don't know if you're familiar with them or not.

Anna Geiger: Yes. Yep, oh yeah. I've seen them.

Tim Rasinksi: They're little exercises where kids go from one word to the next. Research on this out of the University of Pittsburgh has found that when kids do this, these daily word ladders, they improve their spelling, their word recognition, and their comprehension improves. I think I've got about seven word ladder books out there.

Anna Geiger: Oh, great!

Tim Rasinksi: That would be the other one, and I'd invite anybody go to on Amazon and read the reviews. Generally, like 90% of the folks who write about them have said, "Kids love them, and they're actually learning as a result of that." So "Daily Word Ladders" and "The Megabook of Fluency" would be my top choices.

Anna Geiger: Well, I will link to all those things, plus other books of yours in the show notes and your website.

Tim Rasinksi: Okay.

Anna Geiger: Thank you so much for taking time and sharing this. I know people will really appreciate learning from you.

Tim Rasinksi: Well, I'm glad to do it. I'm glad we are able to get connected. My email address, too, I'll actually put it out too.

Anna Geiger: Sure. Sure.

Tim Rasinksi: My email is trasinsk@kent.edu. I'll trust you to put it in the notes too.

Anna Geiger: Sure. I will.

Tim Rasinksi: The other thing is my Twitter feed. My Twitter is @TimRasinski1. So there's a 1 at the end of Rasinski. The reason why I mention that is ever since the pandemic started back in March of 2020, I thought to myself, "Now, what can I do to contribute to teachers and parents at home trying to work with their kids?" So what I've been doing has been a couple times a week, if I can, I post lessons. I do Morphology Monday where I work on morphemes, or I provide resources, so something that a teacher could take this and download it on your computer or print it out and do it right away. Every Wednesday, what I've been trying to do is a word ladder. Then every Friday I call Fluency Friday, and I try to provide a text that kids could practice and eventually perform. If anybody follows me on Twitter, I share these every week.

Anna Geiger: That's awesome.

Tim Rasinksi: Hopefully. That's my goal is to keep doing that. And it's free. You can share it with your colleagues, share it with parents. It's my small contribution to the great work that teachers do.

Anna Geiger: Well, fabulous. Thank you so much.

Tim Rasinksi: All right, well thanks, Anna.

Anna Geiger: You can find the show notes for this episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode99. Talk to you next time!

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What does research tell us about reading fluency? A conversation with Dr. Tim Rasinski

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TRT Podcast #99: What does research tell us about reading fluency? A conversation with Dr. Tim Rasinski Dr. Tim Rasinski is an educator, researcher, writer, and director of an award-winning reading clinic. Today he

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Many children with literacy difficulties find it hard to blend phonemes together. Word Chains games allow a child to focus on sounds without the distraction of graphemes, as each sound is represented by a counter. A single phoneme is changed and the child 're-blends' to make a new word. The Word Chain lists progress from simple CVC words, like 'dog' and 'cat', to more complex words with initial and final blends, like 'stand' and 'crisp'. This allows targeted practice of a very specific skill in just a few minutes.

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Blending Phonemes - Word Chains - Dyslexic Logic

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Resources and word-chains (also called word ladders or word chains) to support teaching blending skills for children with poor phonological awareness, from basic CVC blends to CCVCC words with long and short medial vowels.

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PAST Screener- Phonological Awareness Screener

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PAST Screener- Phonological Awareness Screener

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The PAST can be downloaded above. Please also download and carefully read the instructions before using. Information can also be found in the manual “Equipped for Reading Success” by David A. Kilpatrick, Ph.D in chapter 11 on how to effectively use the test. Make sure to also practice using the test before using it with […]

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Writing Rope Instructional PD by Joan  Sedita

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Writing Rope Instructional PD by Joan  Sedita

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07. The Writing Rope: A Framework for Evidence-Based Writing Instruction  | 2022 Literacy Symposium

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Created By Alexis Lucero