Climb for Fluency

 

climbing

By Morgan Curry

 

Rationale: Students develop fluency by reading decodable text while focusing on speed instead of accuracy. This lesson will help children improve accuracy and automaticity as they focus on fluency through speed. This will be done through partner timed readings.

 

Materials:

-         timers

-         decodable texts (enough for each student and at the appropriate reading level)

-         fluency check sheets (one for each student)

-         fluency chart (large banana tree displayed in class with words read up one side)- this should be the words students can read in one minute, should start at about 5 and go up to the expected words for one minute at their grade level

-         a monkey with each students name on it (this will go on the tree to mark their fluency as well as the of the entire class)

 

Procedures:

  1. Explain the what fluency is and how the chart will be used to show each students fluency
  2. Model fluent and unfluent reading for the class. To do so write or display two sentences for the class, read the first one using fluent reading, then read the second one and display disfluent reading.
  3. Tell the class that you are going to split them into pairs (groups of two) and that they are going to take turns timing each other reading a text. They will read three times each and be timed one minute on each reading. The partner who is timing will circle the word the reader stops on each time.
  4. Also the students will use the fluency sheet to mark their partners reading. They will only do this for the last two readings.
  5. Pass out the books and other materials out to the students and allow them to move around the room to be more comfortable and so that they are spread out. This will also make if fun for them.
  6. Choose partners based on who you think will work well together- this will limit fooling around.
  7. Once they have had a chance to practice with the timed readings a few times start calling the students up by pairs and have them each read to you and then calculate their fluency. Allow each student to place their own monkey on the class fluency chart. This can be done during a center time or other time so that some students don’t get a chance to practice more than others (this makes the process more fair).
  8. This can be done every day or every other day at the teachers discretion.

 

Calculation for fluency:

# of words read - # of miscues= fluency

 

Reference:

http://www.auburn.edu/rdggenie/fluency.html

Click here to return to Inventions