by Ellen Haynes
Rational: This lesson is designed to teach students fluency. Fluency is the ability for a person to read text smoothly, expressively, and quickly. Fluency helps readers to understand the meaning of what they are reading better. Ways to teach fluency includes but not limited to the following: repeated readings, timed readings, and graphs showing data on the student which also show goals and the student’s improvements.
Decodable text for each student (First Airplane Trip by Sara Matson)
Dry erase markers
Graph to record words per minute for each student
1. “Today, we are going to learn about fluency. A fluent reader is able to read quickly, smoothly, and with expression and this helps him or her to comprehend or understand what they are reading. We are going to practice this today. We are going to read the same text a few times and this will help us get familiar with the word and in turn we will read more fluently. If you come across a word that you do not know use your cover-up worm to examine the word, or predict what the word could be by reading to the end of the sentence.”
2. Write an example sentence on the board (During P.E., my friend, Sarah, asked me to sit beside her at lunch.) Model for the students how a non fluent reader would read (monotone voice, no expression). Then, read the same sentence like a fluent reader would read (with enthusiasm, smoothly, and with expression). Discuss with the students which one sounded better and why.
3. “Now I want you to whisper read your book to yourself. This book is about a little dog that is so hungry! We have to read to find out if he gets fed! Remember that we want to read fluently so try your best to read smoothly, quickly, and with enthusiasm. Don’t forget that the goal of reading fluently is to understand the story better!”
4. After the students have finished whisper reading the story once, place them in pairs of 2 and have them read the story aloud to each other.
Have each student come to your desk and have them read the same story. Explain to them that you are going to time them for one minute and when that one minute is up, they need to stop reading and mark the last word that they read. Mark the number of words read correctly on the student’s individual graph. Use the same graph each time to show improvements. After that, ask the student to explain what he or she read. On a scale from 1-5 (1: information does not match the story at all and 5:student includes a complete summary of what the story was about) rank the student on how much they remember.
Fluency graph http://www.nebo.edu/sped/PDF+Forms/lit_fluency_chart.pdf
Text: http://www.superteacherworksheets.com/reading-comp/2nd-planetrip.pdf (Text only, not the worksheets)
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