Categories Literacy

Summer Book Study: Reading Fluency

I am excited to about our summer book study with our friend Abby from Kindergarten Chaos. The summer book study has become a tradition for us. We love going on this journey together and learning and growing so we can be the best teachers possible. Since this journey focuses on teaching reading and will include much about the science of reading (SOR), this will be a JUDGEMENT FREE journey. No shaming. Just teachers learning together!

Our book this summer is Know Better, Do Better. We chose this book because it focuses on the foundations of reading so it seemed like the perfect book for summer!

Chapter 6: Reading Fluency

Here are my takeaways from chapter 6:

Takeaway 1-this one was definitely an aha moment because, well honestly, I had never really thought about it. There are two ways to improve fluency (yes. JUST TWO!): modeling fluent reading and using repeated readings. I guess I’ve always thought about building fluency which is repeated practice but it never registered that there were only two ways.

Take away 2-build repeated reading into all parts of the day. We will discuss this more in the post.

Take away 3-choral reading and echo reading are RESEARCH PROVEN ways to improve fluency. Think about how often we were told over the years not to use echo reading and choral reading because it didn’t make good readers or wasn’t a best practice. Well, guess what? We should have been doing it all along. We are definitely bringing these back into our classroom full force next year!

And yes, fluency is one of the five components of reading and should be included in any discussion of the science of reading. Remember, despite what you see on social media, the science of reading is much more than phonics and phonemic awareness.

Daily Repeated Reading

One of the things we can easily do to build fluency is by modeling fluent reading and using repeated readings throughout the day. One example of this is our morning message. This is daily dedicated fluency practice with repeated reading.

The repeated reading and modeling start on day 1 with the greeting and date of the morning message. I model how to read them fluently and students repeat. The same thing happens with the message. As the year goes on, I model fluent reading of the message and the students repeat. As the students become independent readers, they read the message on their own and then they go back and re-read the message to build fluency. And just as the book says, we notice an improvement in just that one repeated reading!

Poems And Shared Reading Books

The book mentioned poems as a great way to work on fluency with repeated readings. In our classroom, we use poems and sight word readers each week to build fluency. And once again, as the book says, we see so much improvement over the course of the week!

We alternate between a poem and a reader so one week is a poem and one week is a reader. We start day with 1 echo reading. I read and the students echo. Day 2-3 is choral reading. During this time I will try to drop in out as they read. Thursday and Friday are independent reading. The goal is that by the time we get to Friday the students are reading fluently! This is another simple and effective way to build fluency through modeling and repeated reading!