Growing Independence and Fluency
Cambre Prater
Horton
Hears a What? ... A Fluent Reader!
Growing Independence and Fluency
Cambre Prater
Rational: It
is important
for readers to become automatic readers. This will allow readers to
become more
fluent due to their reading becoming faster smoother and more
expressive. Fluency is a student’s ability
to read
accurately and automatically. As a
result of fluency being honed, and increased, students are able to
begin
reading silently and twice as fast. In
this lesson, we will work on gaining fluency through repeated reading,
timed
reading, and one-minute reads (I will demonstrate each of these). All of these activities provide practice to
help increase fluency.
Materials:
Procedures:
1. I will first start out
by explaining what fluency is and what we are going to do today: “Okay
boys and
girls, today we are going to discuss something called fluency.
Does anyone know what being a fluent reader
means?
“Very good! It
means
learning to read easily, with expression and with a good speed! To
become
fluent readers though you have to practice, so that is what we are
going to do
today!
“I am going to
show you the
difference between a fluent and non-fluent reader.
I am going to read this sentence that is on the board first
without fluency:
“Th-e b-o-y
h-a-s a r-e-d
h-a-t o-n h-i-s
h-ea-d!” Was that kind of hard
to understand? That is because I was
not reading it fast and smooth! Now I am going to read it fluently
(point to
each word as I read), “The boy has a red hat on his head.” Now how was
it when
I read that sentence? It was a lot easer to understand wasn’t it
because I read
it fast and smooth! Now you see how
important being a fluent reader is! Reading fluently can be hard, that
is why
we have to practice. When you get to a
word you do not know, remember you can cross check to figure out the
tricky
word, use your cover up critter or figure out the vowel sound first and
then
put together the rest of the word.
2. Next I will
work on one-
minute readings. I will split the class up into pairs, and pass out, Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Suess, the
“Speedy Reading Sheet”, and a laminated copy of Horton and a Who.
3. Once the
class is in
pairs I will explain to them that one of them will be the “reader”,
while the
other is the “recorder.” Once the first
person has read, they will switch jobs! I will explain that I am going
to be
the timer and I will watch the clock and stop the reader after one
minute goes
by. Then, the reader will put their
finger on the last word they read and the recorder will count how many
words
the reader read and record it on the “Speedy Reading Sheet.” The
recorder will
also move the Who up Horton’s back as the reader reads more and more
words in a
minute. Now they will switch roles and
the recorder will now become the new reader.
4. Allow the
students to
repeat this 3 more times so you can average the results.
5. After the
class has
finished their one-minute reads, I will read the entire book to the
children so
they will know how it ends! We will discuss it and then talk about how
listening to it read fluently makes it more enjoyable to listen to and
easier
to understand.
6. For the assessment I
will take up all of the children’s sheets to see how they did.
Hopefully they
will have gotten a little better over time.
We will do this activity more than once so I will be able to compare
their results over more of a long range amount of time.
References:
Dr. Seuss, Horton Hears
a Who
White, Amy.
“1-2-3 Go!!!” http://www.auburn.edu/rdggenie/odysseys/freemangf.html
Barton,
Kimberly. “Speedy Gonzalez Reading” http://www.auburn.edu/rdggenie/odysseys/bartongf.html
“Developing Reading
Fluency” on The
Reading Genie. http://www.auburn.edu/rdggenie/fluency.html.