Fly Away Into Reading

  Growing Independence & Fluency

Lindsay Graves

 Rationale: Children need to become fluent readers, so that they will have a greater ability in reading comprehension, automatacity, and the ability to read faster. Decoding skills make fluency easier, students must practice and master letter-sound correspondences. When children practice strategies and correspondences in repeated readings, they will become more fluent readers. Repeated readings improve the student’s word recognition, fluency, and comprehension skills. 

 Materials:

• Bulletin board background with clouds
• 3 small airplanes with each student’s name on them for independent fluency charts
• Class copies of decodable books designed for different reading levels such as Pen Pals
• Fluency charts that contain clouds for each student: these will be used by the students to graph their one minute repeated readings
• Airplanes with student’s names (for the class bulletin board) 
• Stopwatches

 Procedure:

       1.  “First, we are going to review the strategies we use when we don’t recognize a word.  When we come to a word we may not know how to say such as shed, we must first sound out the vowel. In this word, e says /e/. Next I am going to sound the beginning sound.  It says /shhhh/ . If we add the vowel sound we have shhhhhheeee “Finally, we look at the last sound in the word shed. It is d=/d/. Now we can put all three sounds together to read shhhhheeeed. Shed!" When we come to words we don’t know how to say when we are reading, we can use this vowel-first method to figure it out."

2.   “When we read, we need to try to read as smoothly as we do when we are talking to someone. Reading smoothly allows us to understand what we are reading. Listen as I read a sentence for you with out reading smoothly, or what we call fluently: S-a-m  a-n-d  T-i-m  w-e-n-t  t-o  t-h-e  p-a-r-k.  Would you want me to read a whole book like that to you?   If I read the sentence with fluency, Sam and Tim went to the park, allows the reader to gain comprehension through the text. This time I read the material at a medium pace. This allowed you to keep up and understand what was being read. It is important for all of us to become more fluent readers so we must all practice” (Pass out books for each reading group.)

3.   “Each student within your group is going to practice reading your book three times. Our goal is to read 60 words in one minute. We are going to use our airplanes to show our improvement during the repeated readings. Each partner will use the stopwatch to time you as you read.” Don’t forget to write down the number of words you read after a minute.  Raise your hand when you get done and I will help you graph your results on your chart.

 4.  “It is important for each of you to practice as much as you can, because the more you practice, the faster you will be able to read. You will gain a better understanding of the text the more you are able to read.  If you want to practice at home you can take the books home and practice your reading with your parents or guardians. Another option is do read with a friend during center time.”

5.  Each student can be assessed for one minute reads by viewing his or her fluency.  One minute reads are when one student times the other student as they read for one minute. They will then count up the words they read correctly. The students can use fluency charts to keep up with their individual progress by moving their airplane on their fluency chart. The students will then graph on the bulletin board the highest WPM read after three tries of one minute repeated readings.  It is important to read a new book three or four times after the first book has been accomplished.

References:

Adams, Marilyn Jager. Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print.

Cushman, Shelia. Pen Pals. Educational Insights: Carson, CA, 1990.

Rachel Williams. Faster, Faster, Faster.  http://www.auburn.edu/rdggenie/discov/williamsrgf.html.

Rebecca Bracken. Flying Away With Fluency http://www.auburn.edu/rdggenie/explor/brackengf.html