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Second grade fluency, main focus will be phrasing and how to get our reader to read with more expression and punctation.

1st: Fluent Phrasing will help with proper phrasing, intonation, and expression. This will help students read with expression because it breaks down the sentences for the reader to comprehend more to become expressive as more words complete the sentence.

2nd: Phrase speed practice will help as students can confidently builds accuracy and speed, this can help a student feel confident in their readings. The student will typically get a minute to read a passage and progressively get better as they repeat.

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An effective group repeated reading intervention (Klubnik & Ardoin, 2010) has been developed that allows a tutor to work on reading fluency with up to 3 students in a group format. This tutoring package includes several components, with repeated reading as the 'engine' that drives student growth in reading fluency.

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Partner Reading with Comprehension Check

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Partner Reading with Comprehension Check

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What is fluency? Why does it matter?

Reading fluency is a child's ability to read a book or other text correctly, quickly, and with expression. A fluent reader doesn't have to stop and "decode" each word. Rather, most of the words can be read automatically. This means the reader can focus his attention on what the story or text means. Fluency is the bridge between decoding words and understanding what has been read.

How fluent is your child? How do you know?

Fluency develops over time and with lots of practice. The best way for parents to determine how fluently their child can read is to listen to him or her read out loud. When listening, think about:

Phrasing and smoothness: Does your child read word-by-word with frequent hesitation? Does your child read in short phrases, but ignore punctuation? Does your child read with good phrasing and rhythm?

Pace: Does your child read slowly, at a mixed rate, or at a conversational rate?

Expression and volume: Does your child read with a quiet voice, or with volume and expression?

As your child develops fluency, you will notice that your child reads words in a meaningful way, guided by the text's punctuation. Her reading will be at a conversational pace throughout the reading. She will read with expression, and the volume will sound as though she is talking with a friend.

Here are some things to do for practice

Parents can use the summer months to help their child develop reading fluency.

Paired or "buddy" reading

The easiest and best way to help your child develop fluency is to sit with your child and read! Read together every day, which is often called paired or buddy reading. To use paired reading, simply take turns reading aloud. You go first, as your reading provides a model of what good fluent reading sounds like. Then, ask your child to re-read the same page you just read. You'll notice that your child's reading will start to sound more and more like yours. Do this for several pages. Once your child is comfortable enough, and familiar enough with the book, take turns reading page for page.

Reread favorite books

A second way parents can help develop fluency is to build a tall stack of books that your child can read quickly and easily. Encourage your child to reread favorite books over and over again. With each reading, you may notice your child reading a bit easier, a bit faster, and with a bit more confidence and expression.

Ham it up with a script

Sometimes teachers use poetry and simple, short scripts with kids as a way to foster fluency. Often called Reader's Theater, these short scripts can be a great way to beat the heat on a hot, summer day. Print out enough scripts for each reader and divide up the parts. Then, start rehearsing! With Reader's Theater, there is no need for costumes, and no need to memorize parts. The goal is to encourage your child to read and reread his lines over and over again as part of the play practice. Because it's a play, encourage expression and silliness on behalf of the characters! You'll have fun and be building fluency at the same time.

Try some of these Reader's Theater scripts:

Record it

Another fun way to practice reading and build fluency is to have your child create her own audio books. This can be done simply with a tape recorder or audio recording feature or app (like Audioboo) on your phone. Or, use something more sophisticated like StoryKit, where a user can create an electronic storybook and record audio to accompany it. Regardless of the method you choose, your child will be practicing what they want to record and that reading practice is critical. Sharing your audio recordings with family and friends is a great motivator too!

Listen to books

Listening to a fluent reader read a favorite book provides an excellent model of fluent reading. Audio books are a wonderful way to expose your child to language and fluent, expressive reading. Your public library may have a good collection of audio books to listen to or check out. Here are some other sources for identifying good audio books:

Go mobile! If you have an iphone, ipod touch, or iPad, you might want to try Tales2Go - a subscription app that gives you access to a full library of audio stories.

Finding the right book

Helping your child build fluency starts with the right book. There are two types of books you will want to look for: books for you to read aloud to your child to model fluent reading, and books for your child to read and reread over and over again.

Books for you to read aloud

The best books to read aloud are books that have lively characters with lots of dialog. As the characters talk to each other, you can really ham it up by using different voices and reading with lots of expression. Keep the reading level just beyond what your child can read on her own. That way, you're introducing her to books that she can aspire to read one day but can enjoy today. It helps if you read the book ahead of time to be sure that it is a book you like. Your enthusiasm will be contagious!

Books for your child to read

In order to build fluency, your child should be reading books that are "just right" for her: not too hard, not too easy. It's been called the Goldilocks principle of books! The best books for building fluency may almost seem too easy for your child to read. Read a book for the first time together, using one of our suggestions for practice. Then, schedule reading time into each and every day. As your child develops experience with the book or a poem, listen to hear whether your child is reading the text quickly and accurately, and with expression. These reading behaviors will develop with each rereading, so be sure to keep the same books around for a week or two, and allow time for 6-8 readings of the favorites. Your child's confidence, and fluency, will soar with each successful rereading.

Reading speed

Parents often wonder about reading speed: Does my child read too slowly? Too quickly? Gathering information about your child's reading pace can be helpful. But a word of caution: The ultimate goal of reading is good comprehension and a strong motivation to keep reading. So, be careful about the message you give to your child about reading speed. Faster is not always better! What's most important is that your child understands what he's read and is excited enough about books to keep reading.

One of the best ways to learn about your child's reading pace is to listen to your child read aloud. Does your child read slowly and word-by-word? Is the reading too fast and without expression? Is the reading at a conversational pace with good expression? Does your child understand what he's read? All of these elements (speed, expression, attention to punctuation, comprehension) work together in fluency.

Measuring your child's "words per minute"

A second and more formal way to think about your child's reading speed is to consider the number of words your child is able to read correctly in one minute. This is a measure often used within schools, but it's one that parents could use informally at home too. To get a rough estimate of how many words per minute your child can read, have your child read aloud for 1 minute. Count the number of words your child could correctly read. Expectations by grade level vary, but generally:

By the end of 1st grade, students should be reading more than 50 words correct per minute

By the end of 2nd grade, students should be reading more than 90 words correct per minute

By the end of 3rd grade, students should be reading more than 110 words correct per minute

It's important to remember that words correct per minute is one measure of fluency, and it's a measure that makes the most sense when the information is collected reliably over time. Teachers often gather the information monthly over the course of the school year. As parents, the information could be used as a general informational guideline.

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What is fluency? Why does it matter? Reading fluency is a child's ability to read a book or other text correctly, quickly, and with expression. A fluent reader doesn't have to stop and "decode" each word. Rather, most of the words can be read automatically.

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First Grade Teacher Reading Academy - Fluency

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First Grade Teacher Reading Academy - Fluency

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Third Grade Teacher Reading Academy - Fluency

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Third Grade Teacher Reading Academy - Fluency

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Second Grade Teacher Reading Academy - Fluency

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Second Grade Teacher Reading Academy - Fluency

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11 Alternatives to "Round Robin" (and "Popcorn") Reading | Edutopia

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11 Alternatives to "Round Robin" (and "Popcorn") Reading | Edutopia

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Facts About Round Robin Reading

In RRR, students read orally from a common text, one child after another, while the rest of the class follows along in their copies of the text. Several spinoffs of the technique offer negligible advantages over RRR, if any. They simply differ in how the reading transition occurs:

Popcorn Reading: A student reads orally for a time, and then calls out "popcorn" before selecting another student in class to read.

Combat Reading: A kid nominates a classmate to read in the attempt to catch a peer off task, explains Gwynne Ash and Melanie Kuhn in their chapter of Fluency Instruction: Research-Based Best Practices.

Popsicle Stick Reading: Student names are written on Popsicle sticks and placed in a can. The learner whose name is drawn reads next.

Touch Go Reading: As described by Professor Cecile Somme, the instructor taps a child when it's his or her turn to read.

Of the thirty-odd studies and articles I've consumed on the subject, only one graduate research paper claimed a benefit to RRR or its variations, stating tepidly that perhaps RRR isn't as awful as everyone says. Katherine Hilden and Jennifer Jones' criticism is unmitigated: "We know of no research evidence that supports the claim that RRR actually contributes to students becoming better readers, either in terms of their fluency or comprehension." (PDF)

Why all the harshitude? Because Round Robin Reading . . .

Stigmatizes poor readers. Imagine the terror that English-language learners and struggling readers face when made to read in front of an entire class.

Weakens comprehension. Listening to a peer orally read too slowly, too fast, or too haltingly weakens learners' comprehension -- a problem exacerbated by turn-taking interruptions.

Sabotages fluency and pronunciation. Struggling readers model poor fluency skills and pronunciation. When instructors correct errors, fluency is further compromised.

To be clear, oral reading does improve fluency, comprehension and word recognition (though silent/independent reading should occur far more frequently as students advance into the later grades). Fortunately, other oral reading activities offer significant advantages over RRR and its cousins. As you'll see in the list below, many of them share similar features.

11 Better Approaches
1. Choral Reading
The teacher and class read a passage aloud together, minimizing struggling readers' public exposure. In a 2011 study of over a hundred sixth graders (PDF, 232KB), David Paige found that 16 minutes of whole-class choral reading per week enhanced decoding and fluency. In another version, every time the instructor omits a word during her oral reading, students say the word all together.
2. Partner Reading
Two-person student teams alternate reading aloud, switching each time there is a new paragraph. Or they can read each section at the same time.
3. PALS
The Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS) exercises pair strong and weak readers who take turns reading, re-reading, and retelling.
4. Silent Reading
For added scaffolding, frontload silent individual reading with vocabulary instruction, a plot overview, an anticipation guide, or KWL+ activity.
5. Teacher Read Aloud
This activity, says Julie Adams of Adams Educational Consulting, is "perhaps one of the most effective methods for improving student fluency and comprehension, as the teacher is the expert in reading the text and models how a skilled reader reads using appropriate pacing and prosody (inflection)." Playing an audiobook achieves similar results.
6. Echo Reading
Students "echo" back what the teacher reads, mimicking her pacing and inflections.
7. Shared Reading/Modeling
By reading aloud while students follow along in their own books, the instructor models fluency, pausing occasionally to demonstrate comprehension strategies. (PDF, 551KB)
8. The Crazy Professor Reading Game
Chris Biffle's Crazy Professor Reading Game video (start watching at 1:49) is more entertaining than home movies of Blue Ivy. To bring the text to life, students . . .

Read orally with hysterical enthusiasm

Reread with dramatic hand gestures

Partner up with a super-stoked question asker and answerer

Play "crazy professor" and "eager student" in a hyped-up overview of the text.

9. Buddy Reading
Kids practice orally reading a text in preparation for reading to an assigned buddy in an earlier grade.
10. Timed Repeat Readings
This activity can aid fluency, according to literacy professors Katherine Hilden and Jennifer Jones (PDF, 271KB). After an instructor reads (with expression) a short text selection appropriate to students' reading level (90-95 percent accuracy), learners read the passage silently, then again loudly, quickly, and dynamically. Another kid graphs the times and errors so that children can track their growth.

With Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction (FORI), primary students read the same section of a text many times over the course of a week (PDF, 54KB). Here are the steps:

1. The teacher reads aloud while students follow along in their books.

2. Students echo read.

3. Students choral read.

4. Students partner read.

5. The text is taken home if more practice is required, and extension activities can be integrated during the week.

I hope that the activities described above -- in addition to other well-regarded strategies, like reciprocal teaching, reader's theater, and radio reading -- can serve as simple replacements to Round Robin Reading in your classroom.

Tell us your favorite fluency or comprehension activity.

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11 Alternatives to "Round Robin" (and "Popcorn") Reading | Edutopia

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Round Robin Reading (RRR) has been a classroom staple for over 200 years and an activity that over half of K-8 teachers report using in one of its many forms, despite overwhelming criticism that the practice is ineffective for its stated purpose: enhancing fluency, word decoding, and comprehension.

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Fluency is defined as the ability to read with speed, accuracy, and proper expression. In order to understand what they read, children must be able to read fluently whether they are reading aloud or silently. When reading aloud, fluent readers read in phrases and add intonation appropriately. Their reading is smooth and has expression.

Children who do not read with fluency sound choppy and awkward. Those students may have difficulty with decoding skills or they may just need more practice with speed and smoothness in reading. Fluency is also important for motivation; children who find reading laborious tend not to want read! As readers head into upper elementary grades, fluency becomes increasingly important. The volume of reading required in the upper elementary years escalates dramatically. Students whose reading is slow or labored will have trouble meeting the reading demands of their grade level.

What the problem looks like

A kid's perspective: What this feels like to me

Children will usually express their frustration and difficulties in a general way, with statements like "I hate reading!" or "This is stupid!". But if they could, this is how kids might describe how fluency difficulties in particular affect their reading:

I just seem to get stuck when I try to read a lot of the words in this chapter.

It takes me so long to read something.

Reading through this book takes so much of my energy, I can't even think about what it means.

A parent's perspective: What I see at home

Here are some clues for parents that a child may have problems with fluency:

He knows how to read words but seems to take a long time to read a short book or passage silently.

She reads a book with no expression.

He stumbles a lot and loses his place when reading something aloud.

She reads aloud very slowly.

She moves her mouth when reading silently (subvocalizing).

A teacher's perspective: What I see in the classroom

Here are some clues for teachers that a student may have problems with fluency:

Her results on words-correct-per-minute assessments are below grade level or targeted benchmark.

She has difficulty and grows frustrated when reading aloud, either because of speed or accuracy.

He does not read aloud with expression; that is, he does not change his tone where appropriate.

She does not "chunk" words into meaningful units.

When reading, he doesn't pause at meaningful breaks within sentences or paragraphs.

How to help

With the help of parents and teachers, kids can learn strategies to cope with fluency issues that affect his or her reading. Below are some tips and specific things to do.

What kids can do to help themselves

Track the words with your finger as a parent or teacher reads a passage aloud. Then you read it.

Have a parent or teacher read aloud to you. Then, match your voice to theirs.

Read your favorite books and poems over and over again. Practice getting smoother and reading with expression.

What parents can do to help at home

Support and encourage your child. Realize that he or she is likely frustrated by reading.

Check with your child's teachers to find out their assessment of your child's word decoding skills.

If your child can decode words well, help him or her build speed and accuracy by:

Reading aloud and having your child match his voice to yours

Having your child practice reading the same list of words, phrase, or short passages several times

Reminding your child to pause between sentences and phrases

Read aloud to your child to provide an example of how fluent reading sounds.

Give your child books with predictable vocabulary and clear rhythmic patterns so the child can "hear" the sound of fluent reading as he or she reads the book aloud.

Use books on tapes; have the child follow along in the print copy.

What teachers can do to help at school

Assess the student to make sure that word decoding or word recognition is not the source of the difficulty (if decoding is the source of the problem, decoding will need to be addressed in addition to reading speed and phrasing).

Give the student independent level texts that he or she can practice again and again. Time the student and calculate words-correct-per-minute regularly. The student can chart his or her own improvement.

Ask the student to match his or her voice to yours when reading aloud or to a tape recorded reading.

Read a short passage and then have the student immediately read it back to you.

Have the student practice reading a passage with a certain emotion, such as sadness or excitement, to emphasize expression and intonation.

Incorporate timed repeated readings into your instructional repertoire.

Plan lessons that explicitly teach students how to pay attention to clues in the text (for example, punctuation marks) that provide information about how that text should be read.

More information

Find out more about fluency issues with these resources:

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Fluency is defined as the ability to read with speed, accuracy, and proper expression. In order to understand what they read, children must be able to read fluently whether they are reading aloud or silently. When reading aloud, fluent readers read in phrases and add intonation appropriately.

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Fluency: What is it? Why is it important?

If someone is fluent in speaking another language or in playing an instrument, there's a smooth, graceful and easy quality to it. The same is true with reading skills. Reading fluency is a child's ability to read a book or other text correctly, quickly, and with expression. A fluent reader doesn't have to stop and "decode" each word. Rather, most of the words can be read automatically. This means the reader can focus his attention on what the story or text means. For that reason, fluency is critically important - it is the bridge between decoding words and understanding what has been read.

How can we foster reading fluency?

Parents can help their child develop reading fluency through a few simple and fun activities.

Paired or "Buddy" Reading

The easiest and best way to help your child develop fluency is to sit with your child and read! Read together every day, which is often called paired or buddy reading. To use paired reading, simply take turns reading aloud. You go first, as your reading provides a model of what good fluent reading sounds like. Then, ask your child to re-read the same page you just read. You'll notice that your child's reading will start to sound more and more like yours. Do this for several pages. Once your child is comfortable enough, and familiar enough with the book, take turns reading page for page.

Reread Favorite Books

Another way parents can help develop fluency is to build a tall stack of books that your child can read quickly and easily. Encourage your child to reread favorite books over and over again. With each reading, you may notice your child reading a bit easier, a bit faster, and with a bit more confidence and expression.

Record It

Another fun way to practice reading and build fluency is to have your child create her own audio books. This can be done simply with a tape recorder or audio recording feature or app (like Audioboo) on your phone. Or, use something more sophisticated like StoryKit, where a user can create an electronic storybook and record audio to accompany it. Regardless of the method you choose, your child will be practicing what they want to record and that reading practice is critical. Sharing your audio recordings with family and friends is a great motivator too!

These activities are easy and require very few materials. Doing these activities with your child will help build fluency - a skill that will last a lifetime.

Reprints

You are welcome to print copies or republish materials for non-commercial use as long as credit is given to Colorín Colorado and the author(s). For commercial use, please contact info@colorincolorado.org.

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Subscribe to Growing Readers! Have Growing Readers delivered each month right to your inbox! (In English & Spanish) Sign up here > If someone is fluent in speaking another language or in playing an instrument, there's a smooth, graceful and easy quality to it. The same is true with reading skills.

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Screening, Diagnosing and Progress Monitoring for Fluency | Colorín Colorado

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Screening, Diagnosing and Progress Monitoring for Fluency | Colorín Colorado

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Screening, diagnosing, and progress monitoring are essential to making sure that all students become fluent readers - and the words-correct-per-minute (WCPM) procedure can work for all three. The only aspect of the procedure that has to change is the difficulty level of the text. For screening, passages are selected from text at the student's grade level. For diagnosing, passages are selected at the student's instructional level (which may be lower than her grade level). In this context, instructional level text is challenging but manageable, with the reader making errors on no more than one in 10 words (i.e., the reader is successful with 90 percent of the text). For progress monitoring, passages are selected at a student's individually determined goal level. For example, if an 8th-grade student's instructional level is at the 5th-grade level, the teacher may conduct the progress monitoring assessments using passages at the 6th-grade level.

Screening

Because empirical research clearly indicates the urgent need to provide high quality, intensive instructional interventions to students at risk of reading difficulty as soon as possible, schools should administer screening measures to every student through the 5th grade. First graders should be screened in the winter and the spring; second- through fifth graders should be screened in the fall, winter, and spring. To determine if students are at the expected levels in their reading fluency, my colleague Gerald Tindal and I suggest comparing students' WCPM scores to the 50th percentile score on the norms table below, given the students' grade placement and the approximate time of year in which the assessment was conducted. A score falling more than 10 words below the 50th percentile should raise a concern; the student may need additional assistance, and further assessments may be needed to diagnose the source of the below-average performance. Depending on the age of the student and any concerns about reading performance noted by the teacher or parents, such additional testing might include assessments of oral language development, phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding, and/or comprehension.

Diagnosing

If a student scores poorly on a fluency screening, or if the teacher has some other cause for concern such as poor performance in class or on another assessment, the teacher should take a more careful look at the student's strengths and needs. The student could be deficient in a variety of reading skills or in related areas like vocabulary and background knowledge, so administering some informal diagnostic assessments would be helpful for designing effective instruction, providing evidence of the need for a reading specialist, or referring the student for further evaluation. Typically, if a student's fluency level is low, but word reading accuracy in grade-level texts is adequate, a teacher can place the student in an intervention focused just on improving fluency. But if diagnostic assessments indicate other areas of weakness, a more comprehensive intervention may need to be developed. ( See example below.)

Monitoring student progress

If a student's diagnostic assessment reveals concerns about one or more areas of reading, additional, targeted instruction should begin right away. WCPM procedures can be used to chart progress. Many educators have found WCPM to be a better tool for monitoring students' progress than traditional standardized measures that typically are time-consuming, expensive, only administered infrequently, and of limited instructional utility. For students reading six to 12 months below grade level, progress monitoring should be done frequently, perhaps once or twice monthly for as long as students require supplemental instruction. Progress monitoring should be done as often as once per week for students who are reading more than one year below level and receiving intensive intervention services, including special education. This regular monitoring assures that if the intervention is not working well, it can be modified.

When monitoring the progress of these struggling readers, the standard procedures are expanded by graphing the student's WCPM scores. A progress-monitoring graph, for perhaps a grading period or a trimester, is created for each student. Teachers can use the average weekly improvement (AWI) data in the norms table to select an ambitious, yet reasonable, instructional goal; for example, a fourth-grader's goal could be to improve by 15 WCPM over 10 weeks of intensive instruction. An aim line is placed on the graph to represent the progress a student must make to achieve a preset fluency goal. Each time the student is assessed, that score is added to the graph. If three or more consecutive scores fall below the aim line, the teacher must consider adjusting the instructional program.

Teachers should also consider having the students record their own WCPM scores on their graphs - it increases their motivation and investment in their reading progress.

Examples of a diagnosis

Andrew, an eighth-grader, recently moved to a different town where he entered a new school in March. It soon became evident to his teachers that Andrew was having difficulty with his academic work. At a weekly meeting during which teachers discuss any concerns about their students, several teachers brought samples of Andrew's work to share. The teachers agreed that the school's reading specialist should determine if reading problems were contributing to Andrew's struggle with his assignments in several classes. The reading specialist conducted an IRI (informal reading inventory) and planned to follow up with additional assessments if Andrew's performance on the IRI indicated possible deficits in phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding, vocabulary, and/or comprehension. The specialist built a fluency assessment into the initial IRI by using a stopwatch to determine how many words Andrew could read in the first 60 seconds of each IRI passage.

The reading specialist began the IRI using a sixth-grade passage, two years below Andrew's grade. The passage was at a frustration level for him: He had difficulty with decoding, phrasing, and expression, and was only able to correctly answer four of the eight comprehension questions. Because the passage was at Andrew's frustration level, the WCPM score was not calculated. The specialist then repeated the assessment using a fifth-grade passage; Andrew was able to read it with 94 percent accuracy and correctly answer six of the eight comprehension questions. The specialist calculated Andrew's WCPM score for this passage and compared his score, 131 WCPM, to the norms for fifth-graders in the spring. The 50th percentile in the spring of fifth grade is 139 WCPM. Because Andrew's score fell less than 10 words below it, his fluency is within the expected range for fifth grade readers in the spring.

The reading specialist's conclusion was that Andrew appears to be reading approximately three years below grade level, but that his fluency skill level appears to be appropriate for his overall reading level. Before designing Andrew's reading program, the specialist plans to administer a diagnostic assessment focused on phonics and decoding, and a more comprehensive assessment of vocabulary and comprehension. She suspects there may be some underlying weaknesses in Andrew's decoding skills contributing to his delay in overall reading development. His intervention will likely include fluency instruction and practice to keep him on track, and may also include decoding and comprehension instruction, depending on the results of the other diagnostic assessments.

These procedures for screening, diagnosing, and progress monitoring have been available for many years, but have not been widely used in schools. This situation will likely change as educators become more aware of the importance of preventing reading difficulties and providing intensive intervention as soon as a concern is noted. Using fluency norms to set appropriate goals for student improvement and to measure progress toward those goals can be a powerful and efficient tool to help educators make well-informed and timely decisions about the instructional needs of their students, particularly the lowest performing, struggling readers.

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Screening, Diagnosing and Progress Monitoring for Fluency

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Screening, diagnosing, and progress monitoring are essential to making sure that all students become fluent readers - and the words-correct-per-minute (WCPM) procedure can work for all three. The only aspect of the procedure that has to change is the difficulty level of the text. For screening, passages are selected from text at the student's grade level.

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ELLs and Reading Fluency in English | Colorín Colorado

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ELLs and Reading Fluency in English | Colorín Colorado

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Fluency is the ability to read words accurately and automatically with expression. Because fluent readers do not have to slow down in order to concentrate on decoding the individual words in a text, they can focus their attention on the text's meaning. In this way, fluency acts as a bridge between word recognition and comprehension, and this relationship is reciprocal. That is, when a student understands the meaning of the text he/she is reading, it is much easier to read that text with expression.

Prosody is a term that is frequently heard in discussions of fluency. Prosody refers to the appropriate use of intonation and phrasing in reading. Prosodic reading involves paying attention to punctuation signs like commas and periods, assigning appropriate stress to individual words within a sentence, and raising or lowering voice intonation to match the meaning of the text (e.g., raising the voice at the end of a question). Paying attention to the elements of prosody allows us to quantify and measure what we refer to as "reading with expression."

How fluency relates to ELLs

Instruction in fluency can be particularly beneficial for English language learners because activities designed to enhance fluency in reading can also contribute to oral language development in English. As students practice reading English text accurately, automatically, and prosodically, they are gaining valuable information about the sounds and cadences of spoken English, and they are also developing vocabulary skills that can contribute to oral language fluency, as well as reading and listening comprehension.

Assessing reading fluency

As with any type of instruction, fluency instruction depends upon ongoing assessment to identify individual students' strengths and needs. Effective fluency assessment must include measures of all three components of fluency: reading accuracy, automaticity, and prosody. It is important to note that the accuracy percentages and the reading rate ranges described in this article are based on research conducted in English and should not be applied to reading in other languages. Even languages that use the same alphabet differ in such characteristics as phonetic regularity, syntactical complexity, and even average word length, all of which can affect reading accuracy and rate. Additional research is needed to determine appropriate accuracy and rate ranges for other languages.

Assessing reading accuracy

Accuracy refers to the percentage of words a reader can read correctly in a given text. Measuring accuracy allows teachers to choose texts at an appropriate difficulty level for each student. In order to improve their reading, students need texts that are difficult enough to require them to practice using the reading strategies they are learning without being so difficult that the student is overwhelmed.

In talking about text difficulty, reading teachers often refer to three functional reading levels, which represent the amount of difficulty that a particular level of text presents for a student. Text that is at a student's independent reading level is text that he/she can read with 98-100% accuracy. That is, the student misses no more than two words out of every 100 words of text. At this level, the student can read independently with no support from the teacher. Text that is at a student's instructional reading level is text that the student can read and comprehend, but only with some assistance from the teacher. The accuracy range for instructional-level text is 90-97% for Primer-level text and above and 85-97% for Preprimer-level text. Text that is at a student's frustrational reading level is text that he/she can read with less than 90% accuracy (less than 85% at Preprimer level). At this level, the student would have difficulty reading and comprehending the text, even with the support of the teacher.

Functional Reading Levels

Independent Level

98-100% accuracy

Instructional Level

90-97% accuracy
(85-97% for Preprimer)

Frustration Level

Below 90% accuracy
(Below 85% for Preprimer)

Teachers should target a student's instructional reading level for classroom reading instruction. When students read text that they can read with 90-97% accuracy, they encounter enough challenges to require them to practice the strategies they are learning, but the text is not so difficult that students are overwhelmed. Independent-level text is good for independent reading and for practicing reading speed and prosody. Frustration-level text can be great for comprehension instruction, but only when the teacher is doing the reading! Students should never be asked to read text that is at their frustration level.

Here is a quick way to measure reading accuracy:

Find a short reading passage, and ask the student to read it aloud to you.

Make note of any errors the student makes while reading. Errors include: substitutions (substituting an incorrect word or a nonsense word for a word in the text), reversals (reversing the order of two words in the text), omissions (leaving out a word), or words you have to provide to the student. If the student self-corrects after making a mistake, count the word correct.

Divide the number of words the student read correctly by the total number of words in the passage. This number will be a percentage.

Example: The student read a 200-word passage and missed 14 words.
200 - 14 = 186 words read correctly
186 Â Ã· 200 = .93
The student read the passage with 93% accuracy, which is within his/her instructional reading range.

Assessing automaticity

Automaticity is usually measured as reading rate, or the number of words a student reads per minute (WPM). You can measure rate at the same time that you assess a student's reading accuracy. Here's what you do (you'll need a stopwatch):

Select a short reading passage, and have the student read it aloud. Begin timing as soon as the student reads the first word of the passage, and stop the stopwatch as soon as he/she reads the last word. (To measure silent reading rate, let the student know that you will begin timing as soon as he/she looks down at the passage, and you will stop when he/she looks up at the end. Students should not be expected to read silently until they are reading at second-grade level).

Convert the time on the stopwatch to seconds by multiplying the total number of minutes the student read by 60 and adding the number of additional seconds.

Multiply the total number of words in the passage by 60, and divide by the student's reading time in seconds:

Example: The student read a 200-word passage in 2 minutes and 32 seconds (2:32 on stopwatch).
2 minutes x 60 seconds each = 120 seconds
120 + the remaining 32 seconds = 152 seconds
(200 x 60) Ã· 152 seconds = 79 words per minute (wpm)

Many different researchers have suggested guidelines for how many words per minute students should be reading at particular stages of their reading development. Although there is no one accepted scale, the following ranges, developed by Dr. Darrell Morris at Appalachian State University, can be used as guidelines:

Average End-of-Year Reading Rate Ranges (Grades 1-8)

Grade

Oral rates (wpm)

Silent rates (wpm)

Source: Morris, D. (2008). Diagnosis and correction of reading problems. New York: Guilford.

Note: Reading rate is not assessed until students are reading in Primer-level text and above. Students reading below primer level are still reading word-by-word, focusing all of their attention on decoding the text.

Assessing prosody

Teachers often use rubrics to assess whether students are reading with appropriate pitch variation, intonation, phrasing, and expression. One such rubric is the Oral Reading Fluency Scale created for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). To use this rubric, simply have a student read a short passage of text, and assign a score of 1-4, based on the descriptions below.

NAEP Oral Reading Fluency Scale

Level 3

Reads primarily in three- or four-word phrase groups. Some small groupings may be present. However, the majority of phrasing seems appropriate and preserves the syntax of the author. Little or no expressive interpretation is present.

Level 1

Reads primarily word-by-word. Occasional two-word or three-word phrases may occur - but these are infrequent and/or they do not preserve meaningful syntax.

SOURCE: U.D. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 2002 Oral Reading Study.

Comprehension caveat

Even though fluency instruction is important, teachers must remember that many ELLs can be deceptively fast and accurate while reading in English without fully comprehending the meaning of the text they are reading. That is because reading comprehension depends upon a variety of complex skills that are not as important to word reading. These include deep vocabulary knowledge, syntactical knowledge, and background knowledge of the subject discussed in the text. For this reason, it is always important to pair fluency instruction with good instruction in comprehension.

For some great ideas on both fluency and comprehension instruction with ELLs, see Reading 101 for English Language Learners.

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Fluency is the ability to read words accurately and automatically with expression. Because fluent readers do not have to slow down in order to concentrate on decoding the individual words in a text, they can focus their attention on the text's meaning.

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Colorín Colorado is a national multimedia project that offers a wealth of bilingual, research-based information, activities, and advice for educators and families of English language learners (ELLs). Colorín Colorado is an educational service of WETA, the flagship public broadcasting station in the nation's capital, and receives major funding from the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association.

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Understanding and Assessing Fluency | Colorín Colorado

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Understanding and Assessing Fluency | Colorín Colorado

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Let's cut through the buzz around fluency and review what reading fluency is, why it is essential to ensure that our students have sufficient fluency, how fluency should be assessed, and how to best provide fluency practice and support for our students. We'll start by defining fluency.

While the National Reading Panel's definition of fluency as the ability to read text with accuracy, appropriate rate, and good expression (NICHD, 2000) is widely accepted among fluency researchers, these experts continue to debate the more subtle aspects of fluency (Stecker, Roser, and Martinez, 1998; Wolf and Katzir-Cohen, 2001). However it is defined, this much is certain: Fluency is necessary, but not sufficient*, for understanding the meaning of text. When children read too slowly or haltingly, the text devolves into a broken string of words and/or phrases; it's a struggle just to remember what's been read, much less extract its meaning. So it's important that teachers determine if their students' fluency is at a level appropriate for their grade. If not, how should it be developed? If a student is appropriately fluent for her grade level, how does a teacher help maintain that student's fluency? And, how does a teacher make these determinations? This process begins with assessments of the component pieces of fluency: prosody, accuracy, and rate.

The exact role of expression and phrasing - or prosody - in fluency and comprehension has not yet been determined, but it certainly is one element that signifies whether or not a student is truly a fluent reader. To measure the quality of a student's reading prosody, some educators rely on the four-level scale first developed for the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in reading (Daane, Campbell, Grigg, Goodman, and Oranje, 2005). This scale focuses on the level of skill a student demonstrates in phrasing and expression while reading aloud (see below). After listening to an individual student read aloud, the educator rates the student's reading according to the level that best describes the student's overall performance.

National Assessment of Educational Progress Fluency Scale

Reads primarily in larger, meaningful phrase groups. Although some regressions, repetitions, and deviations from text may be present, these do not appear to detract from the overall structure of the story. Preservation of the author's syntax is consistent. some or most of the story is read with expressive interpretation.

A checklist developed by Hudson, Lane and Pullen (2005, p. 707) provides a more detailed assessment of a student's prosody:

1. Student placed vocal emphasis on appropriate words.

2. Student's voice tone rose and fell at appropriate points in the text.

3. Student's inflection reflected the punctuation in the text (e.g., voice tone rose near the end of a question).

4. In narrative text with dialogue, student used appropriate vocal tone to represent characters' mental states, such as excitement, sadness, fear, or confidence.

5. Student used punctuation to pause appropriately at phrase boundaries.

6. Student used prepositional phrases to pause appropriately at phrase boundaries.

7. Student used subject-verb divisions to pause appropriately at phrase boundaries.

8. Student used conjunctions to pause appropriately at phrase boundaries.

Although most researchers consider prosody important, the subjectivity of judging students' prosody makes it a difficult component of fluency to study. Many researchers have focused on the more easily quantifiable components of fluency (rate and accuracy) and, therefore, some basic questions about prosody - like what should be expected in second grade versus sixth grade - have not been answered. Nevertheless, students' prosody is an extra piece of information for making instructional decisions. When students' speed and accuracy are at appropriate levels, reading with proper phrasing, expression, and intonation should be the next goal.

To measure students' oral reading speed and accuracy, researchers have developed a simple and very brief procedure that uses regular classroom texts to determine the number of words that students can read correctly in one minute. To obtain a words-correct-per-minute (WCPM) score, students are assessed individually as they read aloud for one minute from an unpracticed passage of text.

To calculate the WCPM score, the examiner subtracts the total number of errors from the total number of words read in one minute. An error includes any word that is omitted, mispronounced, or substituted for another word. Words transposed in a phrase count as two errors (e.g., reading "laughed and played" instead of "played and laughed"). Each time a word is read incorrectly it is counted as an error. Words read correctly that are repeated more than once, errors self-corrected by the student, words inserted by the student that do not appear in the text, and words mispronounced due to dialect or speech impairments are not counted as errors. They do, however, impact the final score since they slow the student down and, therefore, reduce the number of words that are read correctly in one minute (Shinn, 1989).

If the passage is randomly selected from a text or trade book, an average score should be taken from readings of two or three different passages to account for any text-based differences. If standardized passages are used (in which the text has been carefully controlled for difficulty), a score from a single passage may be sufficient (Hintze and Christ, 2004). Standardized passages can be found in the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills-DIBELS (Good and Kaminski, 2002), the Reading Fluency Benchmark (Read Naturally, 2002), or Edformation's AIMSWe b materials.

To determine if the student's score is on target, the examiner compares it to the oral reading fluency norms (see Screening, Diagnosing, and Progress Monitoring: The Details). My colleague Gerald Tindal and I (2006) developed these national norms for grades one to eight by analyzing data that were collected using the procedures just described with over 200,000 students from 23 states. It's critical to understand that a WCPM score can be an alarm bell, a canary in a coal mine. If the WCPM is very low, the student is not sufficiently fluent and an intervention is merited. However, a low WCPM score may be the result of weak fluency skills or other reading weaknesses, for example, in decoding, vocabulary, sight words, etc.- so administering some diagnostic assessments may be necessary to determine exactly what type of intervention a student needs.

The canary in the coal mine

With all the assessments schools are required to administer as a result of No Child Left Behind, Reading First, and numerous statewide and district initiatives, some educators are concerned about over-testing students. They ask: "How can we justify spending so much precious instructional time testing our students over and over again?" This concern is certainly legitimate. The purpose of having our students in school is to teach them, not to test them. However, as professional educators, it is imperative that we make decisions about the instruction we provide our students based on the best information available.

The WCPM procedure just described is an extremely time-efficient and reliable way to track students' fluency - and their overall reading ability. While it may be surprising that a one-minute assessment can be so informative, WCPM has been shown, in both theoretical and empirical research, to serve as an accurate and powerful indicator of overall reading competence - especially through its strong correlation with comprehension. Its validity and reliability have been well established in a body of research extending over the past 25 years (Fuchs et al., 2001; Shinn, 1998).

The relationship between WCPM and comprehension has been found to be stronger in the elementary and junior high grades than in older students (Fuchs et al., 2001), likely due to the fact that as a reader matures, competent reading involves more complex skills, vocabulary, and knowledge (and thus any single measure becomes less predictive of general reading competence as a student develops).

Teachers can and should use WCPM as their canary in the coal mine - their first indicator that all may not be well with their students' reading ability.** In first through fifth grade, WCPM should be used to screen all students, help to diagnose a possible cause of struggling students' problems, and to monitor the progress of struggling students who are receiving additional support. To learn how, see Screening, Diagnosing, and Progress Monitoring: The Details.

About the author

Jan Hasbrouck is president of JH Consulting, as well as an affiliate of the Behavioral Research and Teaching Group at the University of Oregon. Her most recent book, which she co-authored with Carolyn Denton, is The Reading Coach: A How-To Manual for Success.

Citations

Hasbrouck, J. (2006). For Students Who Are Not Yet Fluent, Silent Reading Is Not the Best Use of Classroom Time. American Educator, Summer 2006, 30(2).

References

Daane, M.C., Campbell, J.R., Grigg, W.S., Goodman, M.J., and Oranje, A. (2005). Fourth-Grade Students Reading Aloud: NAEP 2002 Special Study of Oral Reading (NCES 2006-469). U.S. Department of Education. Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics. Washington, D.C.:Government Printing Office.

Fuchs, L.S., Fuchs, D., Hosp, M. K., and Jenkins, J.R. (2001). Oral reading fluency as an indicator of reading competence: A theoretical, empirical, and historical analysis. Scientific Studies of Reading, 5(3), 239-256.

Good, III, R.H. and Kaminski, R.A. (Eds.) (2002). Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS), 6th Ed. Institute for the Development of Educational Achievement. Eugene, Ore.:University of Oregon.

Hasbrouck, J. and Tindal, G.A. (2006, April). ORF norms: A valuable assessment tool for reading teachers. The Reading Teacher, 59(7), 636-644.

Hintze, J.M. and Christ, T.J. (2004). An examination of variability as a function of passage variance in CBM progress monitoring. School Psychology Review, 33(2), 204-217.

Hudson, R.F., Lane, H.B., and Pullen, P.C. (2005, May). Reading fluency assessment and instruction: What, why, and how? The Reading Teacher, 58(8), 702-714.

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) (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, D.C.:U.S. Government Printing Office.

Read Naturally (2002). Reading fluency monitor. Minneapolis: Author.

Shinn, M.R. (1989). Identifying and defining academic problems: CBM Screening and eligibility procedures. In M. R. Shinn (Ed.). Curriculum-based measurement: Assessing special children, 90-129. N.Y.:Guilford.

Stecker, S.K., Roser, N.L., and Martinez, M.G. (1998). Understanding oral reading fluency. In T. Shanahan and F.V. Rodriguez-Brown (Eds.), 47th yearbook of the National Reading Conference, pp. 295-310. Chicago:National Reading Conference.

Wolf, M. and Katzir-Cohen, T. (2001). Reading fluency and its intervention. Scientific Studies of Reading, 5(3), 211-239.

Endnotes

*Comprehension depends on reading skills (like decoding and fluency), but it also depends on vocabulary and background knowledge. To learn more about comprehension, see "Building Knowledge: The Case for Bringing Content into the Language Arts Block and for a Knowledge-Rich Curriculum Core for All Children" by E.D. Hirsch, Jr. in the Spring 2006 issue of American Educator, www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/spring06/index.htm.

**There are also screening assessments that should be administered as early as kindergarten, to determine if students are on track for reading achievement. To learn more, see "Preventing Early Reading Failure" in the Fall 2004 issue of American Educator, www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/fall04/reading.htm.

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Let's cut through the buzz around fluency and review what reading fluency is, why it is essential to ensure that our students have sufficient fluency, how fluency should be assessed, and how to best provide fluency practice and support for our students. We'll start by defining fluency.

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Hasbrouck & Tindal's Oral Reading Fluency Data

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Hasbrouck & Tindal's Oral Reading Fluency Data

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Fluency Boot Camp! | Reading. Writing. Thinking. Sharing.

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Fluency Boot Camp! | Reading. Writing. Thinking. Sharing.

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Break up the mid-winter slump and bring a Fluency Boot Camp into your classroom!

What is a Fluency Boot Camp?

No... you will not be shipping your students off (sorry), nor will students have to march around the room (your choice), but I can guarantee that your students' brains will be sweating as they participate in the classroom fluency camp you create!

Just like any boot camp, students will build confidence through practice and drills. You can organize it for just one day, or you can set it up to last a full-week or month! Keep in mind, after just one day, students will start melting-away their non-fluent reading habits... and by the end of the week or month, students will be on their way to becoming confident, fluent readers! 🙂
Are you sold on the idea yet?
How to Organize Your Fluency Boot Camp

Fluency Boot Camp can be modified and customized for pretty much any grade-level and classroom situation. You can set up your Fluency Boot Camp the way YOU want, in any form or style. Consider including overviews of fluency components, practice "drills," and reinforcement activities. I will be sharing many resources to help you get started, but you may need to do a little exploring and research to create your program to meet the needs of your students. One boot camp does NOT fit all!

Want a copy of this planning page?This page is FREE for my email subscribers. If you'd like to download this page, click here to (you will get the password via email). You will also receive exclusive access to my entire growing collection of free literacy resources! (If you're already a subscriber, you may download the resource HERE.)

Fluency Boot Camp Materials

Necessary Materials:

One group of willing soldiers... I mean, students!

Reading passages

Poetry

Readers Theater Scripts

Word/Phrase Cards

Fluency Graphs

Microphone (for audio recording)

Clock/Stopwatches

NOTE: Digital stopwatches are preferred, however you can use an ordinary wall clock or hour-glass board game timers if necessary. If you're looking to purchase stop watches, I would highly recommend ones that can count up and down. There are some great kitchen timers that do this! If you have access to a few computers, there are online stop watches too!

Optional (Fun) Materials:

Whistles (ha!)

Drill Sergeant Hat/Button (for the teacher, of course!)

T-Shirts (builds-up community and team play when all students are dressed in the same "uniform"!)

Survival Packs (including snacks & tissues for their sweating brains!)

What is Fluency?
Let's start with what fluency is... Fluency is the ability to read smoothly and automatically, with expression and attention to punctuation!
That's my simple definition, but I really could expand it to include much more (i.e., prosody, melody, etc.). Do keep in mind, that accuracy plays a huge part in fluency, and students need to ask themselves the big three questions to monitor their reading: "Does it look right? Does it sound right? Does it make sense?" Often, struggling readers have a hard time with fluency due to their self-monitoring and decoding difficulties (which can be addressed in small group intervention groups, separate from Fluency Boot Camp), and as a result their comprehension is greatly affected. Decoding, comprehension, and fluency all go hand-in-hand, so when one piece of the puzzle is weak, the other pieces may suffer!

Struggling readers are not the only ones who need extra support with fluency though! I have many on and above grade-level readers who have difficulty with fluency too. A few of my best readers have wonderful decoding and comprehension skills but are slow and methodical readers. Some of my other high readers read so fast that they stumble over their words or miscue left and right. Fluency is all about finding the "just right" balance of pace, phrasing, expression, and attention to punctuation (with accuracy to tie it all together!). It is an essential literacy skill to develop, which is why a Fluency Boot Camp is the perfect "intervention" for any classroom.

Getting Started
So are you ready to develop a Fluency Boot Camp that will be beneficial for ALL the students in your classroom?
I would recommend starting the first day with an overview of the major fluency components: Pace, Phrasing, Expression, and Punctuation. Each day (or week!) you can get into the "nitty gritty" of each component, with explicit modeling and opportunities for student practice. I would also send home a letter explaining Fluency Boot Camp with a fluency reference sheet attached so they can provide reinforcement as well. Perhaps you'll want to tie in the daily homework with the boot camp activities, or perhaps you send home a book-in-a-bag and you'll want the students to practice fluency with those!
(Grab this FREE student fluency resource from my TpT shop or in my Fluency Boot Camp Sampler!) Online Tools & Resources:
Before you go into the activities, I would create a Fluency Folder for your students to keep all their Fluency Boot Camp materials! The overview reference sheet can be page 1!

NOTE: For an easy-to-make folder, I usually laminate a large piece of construction paper and then fold it in half to create a colorful (cheap) folder that lasts. I punch 3 holes in it and use paper clasps to keep the papers in the folder. All my fluency activity sheets, graphs, reflections are 3-hole punched so the materials can go right into the folder.
These folder labels are free for my email subscribers. Subscribe (If you're already a subscriber, you may download the resource here or using the form below. HERE.)
The "Nitty Gritty" Fluency Activities

As I said in the getting started section, I would begin with an overview and then go into a full day (or week!) for each component. You can pick and choose which activities you integrate, so pick ones that will fit the learning styles and needs of your students.For each activity, make sure you model, model, MODEL! Whether it's an independent activity or a partner one, students need to SEE what the activity looks like and what the expectations are for them. These activities are ones that are more effective with repetition, so be sure to implement them a few times during the camp. You may also want to bring them back later in the year for extra review and reinforcement! We all know students benefit from extra practice!

PACE

Pace = the speed in which you read

The goal is to read at a "just right" pace

Reading not too fast and not too slow

Speed Drills - Speed drills build fluency because they help students quickly recognize letters, words, word families, common syllables, and spelling patterns in multi-syllabic words (depending on your grade-level). Students love trying to beat their score, especially those who have an extra competitive gene in them! I typically do 1-minute partner drills and have the students graph their progress for each attempt!

Reading Passages (Cold/Hot Reads) - Cold and hot reads are perfect for students to see their progress in their reading pace after practice! A "Cold Read" is when a student reads a passage for the very first time (no practice). A "Hot Read" is when the students are warmed-up and have practiced the passage a few times. Students can time themselves or work with a partner! I have my students set a goal for themselves... typically it's words per minute (wpm) range for themselves, so they have a number to shoot for! They color this range in or block it off with a highlighter on their graphs. (Grab a FREE sample graph and calculation reference sheet for Cold/Hot reads from my Fluency Boot Camp Sampler!)
Online Tools & Resources: Speed Drills: Reading Passages:
PHRASING

Phrasing = Chunking the words together into meaningful phrases

Reading in phrases and not reading words one.word.at.a.time.

Phrases are chunks of meaningful text and I usually start this day by introducing the three main types of phrases: Who, Did What, and Where/When/Add-On. I model different phrases and how to put them together in a meaningful sequence to make sentences. Students can then practice creating their own phrases using "Connect-a-Dot Sentences." (Grab a FREE Connect-a-Dot phrasing practice page from my Fluency Boot Camp Sampler!)

Additionally, students can also practice phrasing by using phrase-cued text. Marking the end of phrases with a slash / or the end of lines with //. I also have my students "scoop" their words by underlining or drawing curved scoop lines under the words in each phrase (see student reference sheet above for an example). They then can trace the scoops with their fingers during reading for the first few practice reads. Eventually they should remove the finger scooping so it can become an automatic habit inside their heads!

NOTE: It's important to make the connection between punctuation and phrasing here. Commas and periods are natural phrase markers and students should use these marks to help them read in meaningful phrases.
Online Tools & Resources:
EXPRESSION

Expression= Reading with feeling in your voice

Changing your voice to match a character

Reading like you would speak (and not like a robot!)

Moving your voice up and down

Readers Theater and Poetry are two great ways for students to practice expression (and tie in the components of fluency as well). For both types of text, students can apply expression and practice putting feeling and emotion into their reading!

Readers Theater is a reading play, of sorts. There is no scenery or intricate costumes involved, just students and reading scripts. I like to use puppets, hats, and props but it is not necessary. Students are assigned parts and can practice their lines independently or with their group. A performance can take place for students to "show-off" their amazing expression!

Poetry reading is a little less involved than Readers Theater activities, but just as effective! During regular instruction, you can integrate all sorts of word work and mini-lessons on poetry elements, but sometimes it's perfect for just plain ole' fluency! Students especially love reading silly poems , so this is a time to break out the Shel Silverstein and Kenn Nesbitt. As long as students can control their giggles, they'll love having time during Fluency Boot Camp to explore and read these poems... with fluency, of course!

NOTE: Practice is key with both, and students should read each repeatedly to build up good fluency.
Online Tools & Resources: Readers Theater Scripts: Poetry:
NOTE: A great poetry book for your classroom is Partner Poems for Building Fluency. It is listed for grades 4-6, but I've used some of them with my 2nd and 3rd graders as well. You can download sample pages here! A younger version of Partner Poems for Building Fluency for Grades 2-4 is available on Amazon, but I've haven't check it out yet!

Looking for more partner poetry?! Check out some of my own original partner poems here!

PUNCTUATION

Punctuation = Reading with attention to punctuation

stopping and taking breaths at periods . . .

pausing at commas , , ,

making your voice go up for question marks ? ? ?

showing excitement for exclamation points ! ! !

using "quotations" to change voice for characters

Writing with punctuation is often a chore for students, but reading with punctuation can be fun! Tying right in with expression, students can practice using the different kinds of punctuation when they read. First I model what reading sounds like without punctuation. By the end I'm panting for breath and ready to pass out, since I didn't pause once. Students get a kick out of this but it definitely proves a point. Sometimes I'll give them a punctuation-less passage to try on their own. They can even "fix it up" after to make it sound right, putting in the periods, commas, quotations marks, etc.

I also love giving students a sentence like, "I love french fries" and having them read it three different ways:
I love french fries. I love french fries? I love french fries!
Students can practice making and reading their own sentences three different ways with a partner or small group.

Another activity to try, is to have punctuation cards for students to hold up while a partner reads a short poem or a passage. As students HEAR punctuation, they hold up the appropriate card to show they know which one was used. Students have to be careful readers when they read the poem/passage, and careful listeners when it's their turn to hold the cards!
Online Tools & Resources:
TECHNOLOGY

Audio Recording - Students can record their before and after reading of a passage. They listen to both recordings and then reflect and set goals for themselves for the next time they read! (This is VERY powerful for students to listen to their own reading!)
Online Tools & Resources:
Other Great Resources...
Programs:

HELPS (FREE comprehensive fluency program with many great resource links!)
Websites:
NOTE: For grade-specific fluency resources from from the Florida Center for Reading Research, click on these links: K-1, 2-3, 4-5 and then scroll down to the "Fluency" section!
Professional Books:
Reflecting & Celebrating

Don't forget to celebrate student success (and survival!). Download these stickers for students to wear, and a printable certificate for students to take home! ( Note: You can print it as a full sheet or two to a page under print options!)
My email subscribers can download these stickers and certificate for free. Click (If you're already a subscriber, you may download the resource here to subscribe or sign up below. HERE.)
You can even have an awards ceremony to hand out the certificates. Perhaps the students can vote on the students in the class who exemplified "Most Improved" or "Best Pace," etc. Just be sure to make it fair and include all students somehow. We don't want any tears in this boot camp!

Also, a great follow-up to Fluency Boot Camp would be for students to reflect on their fluency progress. Students should think about their strengths, weaknesses, and what they can improve upon. Students can keep their self-reflections in their Fluency Folders to set goals and monitor their own progress throughout Fluency Boot Camp, or perhaps even the year! (Download a FREE Student Self-Assessment page in my Fluency Boot Camp Sampler!)

Want to start tomorrow but don't have time to put one together?

If you are interested in bringing a Fluency Boot Camp into your classroom but don't have the time to put together your own binder of materials, consider checking out my " Fluency Boot Camp" classroom resource! This product has 90+ pages of extra posters, activities, forms, and student materials, and contains everything you need to get started with fluency instruction. Download a FREE sample below!

An additional product, with 50 pages of supplemental Word Lists and Speed Drill Materials, can be found here!

Subscribe for a FREE Fluency Boot Camp Sampler Pack!

Hope you've found these resources helpful! Now it's time to "Fall in Line!" and find the program that works best for you! 🙂 I would love to see pictures or hear stories "from the trenches" about how Fluency Boot Camp worked out in your classroom.

-

Happy Teaching!

**This post contains affiliate links. Click HERE to learn what that means!
(NOTE: The resources on this blog are ones that I have used with my students grades 2-5. Many of the activities can be modified for younger students but not all may be appropriate. The ideas shared are just a starting point and not an exhaustive list. With that in mind, I would be happy to explore some options for your unique setting if you just email me or leave a comment below!)

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Break up the mid-winter slump and bring a Fluency Boot Camp into your classroom! What is a Fluency Boot Camp? No... you will not be shipping your students off (sorry), nor will students have to march around the room (your choice), but I can guarantee that your students' brains will be sweating as they participate in the classroom fluency camp you create!