Hopp into Reading!
Growing Independence and Fluency
Rationale: Children who are fluent readers have the ability to read text fast
and smooth. Reading can be frustrating for children who cannot read fluently.
Children will more likely find a love for reading once they are able to read
fluently. Repeated Readings of text has been shown to produce improvements for
children's fluency, along with their comprehension of the text and word
recognition. This lesson strives to increase children's fluent reading by
providing them with passages for repeated readings. The best way to learn
fluency is to read and reread decodable text. In this lesson we will read and
reread "Lee and the Team" to become fluent readers.
Materials:
"Lee and the Team" Book, one for every student to do repeated readings with
A stopwatch for every group of students.
A chalkboard and chalk for each group to write practice words on the board.
Worksheet for with a field on it for the children to advance their rabbit on as
they improve their fluent reading.
A cut out rabbit for each child to move across the field. .
Procedures:
Introduce the lesson to all of the students; explain how fun it will be once we
all become fluent readers.
1. Say: "Children, who knows what the best letter is to start with when trying
to decode a word?" Say: " We should start with the vowel sound and then add the
first letter and then add the last letter. An example of this is sat.
When trying to decode this word, I would start with the vowel sound a=/a/. Then
I would add the s sound. Finally, I
will add the t sound. Then we would say
s-a-t.Sat. See, we have sounded out
the word sat. Let's try this on the board with some other words: bed,
map, hit, doc.
2. Introduce the term blending to the children. When we sound out all of the
sounds of the sounds s-a-t, this is called blending. Let's blend out some of the
words together. I will say the sounds of some words, and I want us to blend them
together. Here are the words: b-a-d, s-e-e, s-a-d, m-e-t. Let's blend
these sounds together to come up with the words. "As you probably noticed, it is
so much easier to read when we can say them smoothly. It is hard to understand
them when we say them choppy." Once we all learn to blend and decode, we will be
on the road to fluent reading.
3. Now, we need to practice. This will help us all be fluent readers. I want
everyone to find a partner. Each group get copy of "Lee and the Team" and a
stopwatch. We are going to read this book to our reading buddy. Each child will
get a turn to read, and after we both read, we will do it again. The second time
we are going to use the stop watch so we can see how long it takes us to read
this story. Remember to use all of the strategies we have talked about. Take
your field worksheet and move the rabbit from one side of the field to the other
as your reading time improves. We will do repeated readings several times.
Assessment:
I will call each child up during center time and have them read "Lee and the
Team" to me. I will record their time and their improvements in their reading
folder. I will be using a rubric in which I will look for decoding and blending
strategies. I will also use a stop watch to accurately time the reading.
References:
Lee and the Team
Denamur, Whitni: Reading Genie