Super Reader
Growing Independnece and Fluency
Ginny Bell

Rationale:


Students must learn to recognize words effortlessly for them to become fluent readers. First the student needs to learn to decode words for them to become fluent. By practicing pseudo words, reading, and rereading books, students will learn to read faster and more fluently.

 

Materials:

Pencil, paper, stop watch, class copy of Red Gets Fed, flash cards with pseudo words: fip, naf, zain, pone, cheel, hatmail, unrodely, along with flash cards with pseudo words for each student

Procedures:

  1. Begin by going through pseudo words. Hold up a card and ask the class to read the word. Help the students understand that we sometimes must chunk words in order to decode them. “I AM GOING TO SHOW YOU HOW TO DECODE A WORD BY CHUNKING. THE WORD IS FOOT-BALL. I FIGURED OUT THE FIRST CHUNK OF THE WORD FOOT AND ADDED IT TO THE SECOND CHUNK OF THE WORD BALL TO MAKE FOOTBALL!” Make sure the students are doing well at reading the pseudo cards before moving on to the sample sentence.
  2. Display a sample sentence on the board. “WHEN I READ THIS SENTENCE MAKE SURE ALL OF YOU NOTICE HOW I SAY IT SLOW AND CHOPPY AS IF I HAVE NEVER READ IT BEFORE.” Read the sentence a few times slowly, but make one of the readings smooth and flowing. “WHICH TIME DID YOU THINK THE SENTENCE SOUNDED BETTER? WHY WAS IT ANY BETTER THAN THE REST OF THE TIMES I READ THE SENTENCE, I SAID THE SAME THING EVERY TIME?” Confirm that it makes much more sense to read a sentence when it is read fluently. Explain that, “TO READ FLUENTLY MEANS THAT YOU ARE READING SMOOTHLY AND EFFORTLESSLY.” Provide another sentence to check to see if the students understand the lesson so far.
  3. Pass out Red Gets Fed to each student. “LET’S PRACTICE READING THIS BOOK UNTIL WE CAN READ IT FLUENTLY. AND DOES ANYONE REMEMBER WHAT THAT MEANS?”
  4. “READ THE BOOK TO YOURSELF AND I WILL WALK AROUND THE ROOM TO SEE IF ANYONE HAS ANY QUESTIONS.” Give the students enough time to read the book to themselves a few times.
  5. Have the students come to my desk one at a time and read the book to me while I time them. “NOW WE ARE GOING TO SEE HOW FAST WE CAN READ. I WILL CALL ON EACH OF YOU ONE AT A TIME TO COME READ TO ME WHILE I TIME YOU. WHILE YOU ARE WAITING, GET WITH A PARTNER AND GO THROUGH THE PSEUDO WORD CARDS AND HAVE EACH OTHER READ THE WORDS.DON’T FORGET TO CHUNK!!”
  6. Assessment: Time each student while they read the book with a stopwatch and record the time on a chart.

 

References:

www.auburn.edu/rdggenie (Reading Genie by Dr. Bruce Murray)

 

Cushman, S. and Kornblum, R. Red Gets Fed. Educational Insights. California: 1990.


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