Go,
Speed Racer!!
Growing Independence and Fluency
By: Brandi Gainor
Rationale: Children
learn sight words by decoding them. However, as they begin to get
older, decoding begins to get in the way of fluency because readers
have to think about each word and its letters as they read. As
they begin to get more practice, fluency eventually leads the way and
children in turn become successful readers. Fluency is the
ability to read words fast, automatically, and effortlessly. Once
children can read effortlessly and fluently, they can focus more on the
meaning of the text. This lesson will help children to increase
their fluency by rereading texts and becoming more familiar with
it. Children will learn what it is and is not to be a fluent
reader and they will have opportunities to practice reading
fluently. Students will practice in activities that will aide in
strengthening their ability to read fluently.
Materials:
Chalk and chalkboard
Class set of Tiny Goes to the Library
by: Mavis Smith
Fluency checklist for
each student (Content: on the second and third time my
partner: remembered more words, read faster, read smoother, read
slowly, stopped many times, and did not stop at all during reading)
Progress chart for each
student
Stopwatch
Procedures: 1.
Introduce the lesson by saying that in order to become a
successful reader, you must be able to read fluently. Fluency is
when you are able to read fast without stopping to sound out each
word. You recognize the words automatically and you read them
with little or no effort. Once you become fluent readers, the
text will begin to make more sense because you do not have to try so
hard to read each word. One way that we can work on fluency is by
reading a text more than once. Each time you read the text, you
get faster because you are becoming more familiar with the text.
Today we are gong to practice fluency by reading a text more than once
and seeing how much we can improve. 2. First,
let us review the steps that we take if we are not able to read a
word. The first thing that you do is the cover-up method.
Remember when we went over this? Let us use the word fish to practice. Fist we
would cover everything except for the vowel i. The i makes the /i/ sound. Next,
we would uncover the f which
makes the /f/ sound and say /fi/. Now, what is it called when two
letter make one sound? Right a digraph. So we would then
uncover the sh that makes the
/sh/ sound and put the word together to get fish. Lastly, we would read
the sentence with the word fish
to see if it made sense. Now that we have done our review, let’s
move on. 3.
Demonstrate reading a sentence with fluency and without
fluency. I am going to write a sentence on the board and I am
going to show you how to read it fluently and how to read it without
fluency. (Write on the board I had fun with my dog) Teacher
reads it I h-a-d f-u-n w-i-th my d-o-g. Could anyone understand
what I just read? Not very well right? Now I am going to
read it again. I had fun with my dog. Now does it make
sense? It did because I did not have to spend so much time on
each word. This is what we are going to be working on today,
reading so that the words begin to flow together. 4. Now, we
are going to do some practice. Pass out class set of Tiny Goes to the Library.
This book is called Tiny Goes to the Library and what I want you to do
is to read through the book a few times on your own and then we are
going to have a discussion about the book. I will be walking
around while you read so raise your hand if you need any help. 5. When the
students are finished, I will ask them questions to see if they
comprehend what they read. I will ask: What type of animal is
tiny? What happens when Tiny arrives at the library? What did
Tiny do that was such a big help? 6. I will
then divide the students into partners. I will explain how to
fill out the fluency checklist for a partner. The checklist
includes (on the second and third time my partner: remembered
more words, read faster, read smoother, read slowly, stopped many
times, and did not stop at all during reading). The students will
begin reading with their partners. Each person will read through
the story once. On the second and third reading, their partner
will check all that apply to the readings. The partners will then
switch tasks. 7. For
assessment, each student will come to my desk and read the book
aloud. They will bring with them their checklists. I will
do a one-minute reading with the student assessing his/her
fluency. I will have a progress chart for each student, and I
will mark the progress from the one-minute reading. Each time
that a fluency test is done, the progress will be charted. The
charts will be posted in the classroom.
