Growing independence and fluency

Whitni DeNamur


Title: Leap into Reading!!

 

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 in 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 re read decodable text. In this lesson we will read and reread Pat’s Jam to become fluent readers.

 

Materials:

“Pat’s Jam” Book, one for every student to do repeated readings with

A stop watch for every group of students

Chalkboard and chalk to write practice words on the board

Worksheet for with three Lily pads on it for the children to advance their frog on as they improve their fluent reading.

A cut out frog for each child to move to the Lily pads.

 

Procedures:

  1. Introduce the lesson to all of the students; explain how fun it will be once we all become fluent readers.
  2. Children, who knows what the best letter is to start with when trying to decode a word? We should start with the vowel sound and then add the first letter and then add the last letter. An example of this is cat. When trying to decode this word, I would start with the vowel sound a=/a/. Then I would add the c sound. Finally I will add the t sound. See, we have sounded out the word cat. Let’s try this on the board with some other words: bed, map, hit, doc.
  3. Introduce the term blending to the children. When we sound out all of the sounds of the sounds c-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, h-a-t, 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.
  4. Boys and Girls, We need to practice now so we can all be fluent readers. I want everyone to find a partner. Each group take copies of Pat’s Jam 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 lily pad worksheet and move the frog from one, two and three 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 Pat’s Jam 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:

Pat’s Jam. Educational Insights, 1990.

 Jeremy Knowles, Ready, Set, Read! Growing Independence and Fluency.

http://www.auburn.edu/rdggenie/guides/knowlesgf.html


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