Fluent Reading with Frog and Toad


frog friends


Caitlin Pickelsimer

Growing Independence and Fluency

 

Rationale: Fluent reading is very important in a child's reading development and success. Fluent reading is reading in which words are recognized easily and automatically. This lesson is designed to help students increase their fluency by reading and rereading text to become familiar with it.  Children will be able to recognize the importance of automatic fluent reading and it will help them to gain more meaning and understanding from the text. 

Materials:

Dry erase board, Markers, Frog and Toad are Friends (enough copies for each student), Stop watch (enough for each group), Partner Reading Fluency Checklist

 Name:

Partner’s Name:

            First Read:       _______ Words Read

            Second Read:  _______ Words Read

            Third Read:     _______ Words Read


Did my partner read smoothly?          YES    NO

Did my partner comprehend?             YES    NO

Did my partner read faster?                 YES    NO

Was my Partner a Fluent Reader?       YES    NO

 

Procedure:

1. "Today, we will be learning to become more fluent readers. A fluent reader is someone who can read smoothly without stopping as much between words. The more fluent readers we are, the better we will understand what we read because we won't have to stop to sound out words! The way we will practice becoming more fluent readers is by reading our books more than once. Then, we will time ourselves reading those books. The more we read our books, the more familiar we will become with those books.

2. Next demonstrate to the students the difference between reading with and without fluency. "I am going to show you how important fluency is and how much it might help us in reading, by reading this sentence with and without fluency." Write the following sentence on the board: That car raced past us. "First I will read the sentence as a non-fluent reader would read it: Th-Tha- That c-ca-car rac-race-raced p-pa-pas-past u-us. After I had trouble with the tricky words, I crosschecked so that I could read the words correctly. Did you notice how I read the sentence very slowly? Now I am going to read this same sentence again, but this time I will read it more fluently. That car raced past us. Could you hear the difference between the first reading and the second? The second time I did not have to spend time sounding out any of the words. That's what it sounds like to read fluently, which makes reading faster. When you are a fluent reader you also read with expression. This means that you read the sentence with an emotion like: sad, angry, frustrated, happy, excited and many more. I'll read another sentence and you tell me if I sound like a beginning reader or a fluent reader. "Nancy loves her pink dress" Yep! A fluent reader, great job!

3. "We are going to read the book Frog and Toad are friends to help improve our fluency. In this book, Frog and Toad are best friends.  They enjoy spending their days together. The cheer each other up, help each other when in need, and take care of each other. Through this book we are going to go on many different adventures with them. We will have to read Frog and Toad are friends to see where they go and what they do. As a reminder, when you are reading, you may come to a word that you are unfamiliar with. It's okay! Who can tell me what we need to do if we come to a word we do not know? Right! We will not skip the word. First, we will sound out the word. Then, we will cross-check to make sure the word fits into the sentence. Finally, we will re-read the sentence to make sure we understand what it is trying to tell us. Now, let's get into our groups and practice being fluent readers!"

4. Next, I will split the students up into groups of two. I will explain to the students about the one minute read chart and the fluency literacy rubric. "When you break into pairs, one of you will be the reader and the other will be the recorder. The reader will read the book for one minute three different times. The recorder will start and stop a stop watch, and will announce when it is the time to begin and end after the end of one minute. The recorder will also write down the number of words read in one minute on the record sheet. After the reader has read three times, you will swap jobs and do the same thing again.

5. When the students have finished recording the one minute reads, I will then have them fill out a fluency literacy rubric about their partner. They will check the boxes on how the student performed on the 2nd and 3rd times reading the book for one minute. I will explain to the students that this is an important job, and they should not make fun of their friends.

Assessment:

In order to measure each child's success, I will have each child reread a portion of Frog and Toad are Friends to me again. I will take notes of how smoothly the child reads, as well as the number of words they read correctly/incorrectly. I will compare how they perform for me to their results on the fluency checklist to see what steps we need to take from this point.

 

References:

Lobel, Arnold (1970). Frog and Toad are Friends. New York. Harper & Row.

Dugas, Claire. "Toad leaps into Reading."

http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/insp/dugasgf.html

 

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