How
Fast Does Your Boat Go?
Growing in
Sarah Lynn Cowart
Rationale: Fluent
readers read faster, smoother, and more expressively. By reading
and rereading, the students can learn to read faster. We will
focus on the pace of the reader. This lesson will help to assess and
improve this skill.
Materials:
Bud the Sub (one for each student)
Stopwatches (1 per 2 children)
Large poster colored to represent the ocean
small paper boats with Velcro for each child
chart (for teacher use) to record their previous times
pencils.
Procedures:
1. Review the correspondence u = /u/ so that this will be familiar when
reading the text. “Remember kids when we talked
about our friend u. What sound does he make? That’s right /u/. Today we
are going to speed up our reading.”
2. Introduce the lesson by giving a book talk on Bud the Sub.
“Bud is a Sub and has a friend named Gus that drives Bud around in the
ocean. Gus is driving Bud in the ocean and all of the sudden they see a
tug boat. Oh NO! Bud is on the way to hitting the tug. What is going to
happen? Let’s read to find out if Bud will miss the tug. Will everyone
be okay?”
3. “I am going to read for you part of Bud the Sub. I want you
to listen to how I am reading.” Read the first page of the book to the
student very slow and boring. “Can you pay
attention when I read books like this? No? “
4. Ask the
students what you can do to improve your reading. “What can I do
to improve my reading?” Make a list of all of their suggestions.
Explain to them that the way you talked about the book made it sound
like a wonderful book, but the way you were reading it made it seem
very boring. “This book sounded like a great book
when I first told you about it. When I started reading it sounded
really boring because I wasn’t reading with fluency or expression.”
5. Explain to the students that it is hard to understand a book if you
it too slowly and without expression. Reread the first page, this
time at a faster pace and with expression. Get students to point
out the differences. “I am going to read the book a
different way now. Listen and when I get finished I want you to tell me
the differences from how I read it the first time.”
6. Introduce the Ocean Poster and pass out boats to the students.
“I have posters for all of you. We will be able to chart the number of
words that we read by using this poster. Each of you will be paired up
with a partner. When you get into pairs each of you will read while the
other counts the number of words you can read in a minute. When you
finish reading you partner will be able to move the boat up the ocean
toward the shore. After each reading you should see how well you are
doing and how many words you are reading per minute. I know you guys
will be doing a great job.” Put the children into pairs and instruct
them to time each other and count the number of words they read in one
minute.
7. “You will each get a chance to read the book a second time to see
how well you progressed.” Allow students to reread
the book two more times recording how many words per minute they read
each time.
8. For assessment, compare the first to last reading and document any
improvement.
Reference:
Eldredge, J. Lloyd, (2005). Teaching Decoding: Why and How. Prentice
Hall Inc. p.160
Lauren Buck.
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