Fluency – Put it in practice

For the past couple of days I have talked about fluency,. Today I wanted to share some apps and online games for students to do in order to improve their fluency skills. Reading should be fun and not a terror. I hope you find something here that might be useful to your young reader.

Computer games:

Sight Word Games

More Sight Word Games

iPad apps:

Sight Words Learning Game

One Minute Reader

Reading Speed/Fluency Builder – grades 2-5

Monkey Junior – Learn to Read

Phonics Fun Farm Games

iPad apps - Pinterest

55 free iPad apps for practicing reading

Do you have any other games or apps to share? Please share the links to them. Thanks!

Fluency – More Ideas

I’m continuing with some suggestions to help my friend’s child with fluency. I really like the ReadWriteThink site for reading ideas. Here are some more:

Improving Fluency through Group Literary Performance – Lesson Plan for Grades K-2; “Bill Martin, Jr's picture books are known for their creative use of language. In this lesson, the repetition, rhythm, and rhyme of Martin's works provide opportunities for students to hear fluent reading modeled before participating in the readings through literary performance. By inviting students to participate in the shared and choral reading, the lesson provides students the chance to focus their fluency and comprehension. The readers theater section of the lesson allows students to demonstrate for an audience, while improving their literacy skills further.”

Multipurpose Poetry: Introducing Science Concepts and Increasing Fluency – Lesson plan for grades 3-5; “Poetry can be a fun and unintimidating way for ESL students to develop their oral fluency. In this lesson, students discuss what they know about poetry and then work in small groups to develop a choral reading of two poems about an assigned insect. The poems serve as an introduction to a research investigation (via the Internet) about the insect. Students use a worksheet to compile factual information about the insect and present the information, along with their choral poetry readings to the class.”

Using Paired Reading to Increase Fluency and Peer Cooperation – Strategy guide for grades K-6; “In this strategy, students read aloud to each other, pairing more fluent readers with less fluent readers.  Likewise, this strategy can be used to pair older students with younger students to create “reading buddies.”  Additionally, children who read at the same level can be paired to reread a text that they have already read, for continued understanding and fluency work.  This research-based strategy can be used with any book or text in a variety of content areas, and can be implemented in a variety of ways.”

Using Story Innovation to Teach Fluency, Vocabulary, and Structure – Lesson plan for Grades 3-6; “This lesson gives students an opportunity to practice comprehension, vocabulary, and fluency and to explore story elements in a fun and unique way through a strategy called story innovation. Story innovation takes a text and allows the students to change characters, setting, and story elements to make a personalized version of the story. The story is then read aloud to reinforce the student's fluency skills with a now-familiar text. The students then compare and contrast their story to the original. The story innovation strategy allows for many different adaptations for subject and grade. Pick your favorite story, and have your students adapt it in any way that you choose.”

Do you have any other resources for teaching fluency? Please share.

Improving Reading Fluency

I recently talked to a friend who mentioned her child struggled with reading fluency. Reading fluency is important to helping comprehension so I thought I would look

Reading Rockets had great information on improving reading fluency and gives several classroom strategies that can help.

Timed repeated readings – “Timed repeated readings are an instructional practice for monitoring students' fluency development. Repeated readings, under timed conditions, of familiar instructional level text can increase students' reading speed which can improve comprehension.”

Audio assisted readings – “Audio-assisted reading is an individual or group reading activity where students read along in their books as they hear a fluent reader read the book on an audio recording (audiotape, audio book, or iPod). As confidence and reading skills develop, students read the same passage or text without the assistance of the audio recording.”

Shared readings– “Shared Reading is an interactive reading experience that occurs when students join in or share the reading of a book or other text while guided and supported by a teacher. The teacher explicitly models the skills of proficient readers, including reading with fluency and expression. The shared reading model often uses oversized books (referred to as big books) with enlarged print and illustrations.”

Choral Reading – “Choral reading is reading aloud in unison with a whole class or group of students. Choral reading helps build students' fluency, self-confidence, and motivation. Because students are reading aloud together, students who may ordinarily feel self-conscious or nervous about reading aloud have built-in support.”

Reader’s Theater - “Reader's theater is a strategy for developing reading fluency. It involves children in oral reading through reading parts in scripts. In using this strategy, students do not need to memorize their part; they need only to reread it several times, thus developing their fluency skills. The best reader's theater scripts include lots of dialogue.”

Paired Reading - Paired reading is a research-based fluency strategy used with readers who lack fluency. In this strategy, students read aloud to each other. When using partners, more fluent readers can be paired with less fluent readers, or children who read at the same level can be paired to reread a story they have already read. Paired reading can be used with any book, taking turns reading by sentence, paragraph, page or chapter.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash