Improving fluency for students can be fun while they are learning! Add in an ice cream scoop and they will be loving it as they practice reading fluency!
A good way to begin your whole group or small group lesson is with quick word warm-ups! You can read that post about fluency at the word level right here to catch up.
Most of the time, I have found that my students need to take fluency in smaller steps. So we practice improving by using fluency phrases. When using phrases, the guess work is taken out for the students. They don’t need to worry about where to put in the pauses. We can do that for them!
Using phrases taken right out of the books students love and are reading is a perfect way to practice! Be sure to discuss punctuation like commas- great natural place to pause. And also the ending punctuation if you use phrases from the ends of sentences.
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If you have students reading multisyllabic words, these fluency phrase cards are ready to use! Grab a few and have students do a quick practice with them during your lesson. Along with the comprehension cards that are included, these fluency phrases make great intervention or center activities!
As students build their skills and their confidence with reading fluency phrases, let’s use those ice cream scoops to “scoop” the phrases in whole sentences! Use full sentences written on sentence strips for students to scoop up the words as they improve their fluency.
The same thing can be done with tapping out phrases with a small mallet. One tap means one full phrase read smoothly.
A great visual for students as they scoop the words into phrases is to fold the sentence strip where they would pause when reading.
Now that you have moved from fluency phrases to sentences, try the same thing with short paragraphs. You can write the paragraph out on chart paper or work from the Smartboard.
Be sure to teach scooping with both fiction and non-fiction texts. Different types of texts will feel and read differently. Students may need to practice more in one type than another.
READING TIP:
It can often help your students to teach them to read with character voice or a teacher voice. Using a character voice obviously works well with fictional texts. But then they can switch over to their teacher voice when reading informational texts. I tell students that a teacher voice sounds confident, like they are teaching the listener important information. It is fun to hear them switch between character voice and teacher voice!
And don’t forget, you can provide opportunities for fluency phrases practice digitally too! Our fluency phrase cards and comprehension cards are interactive and effective activities that improve reading fluency!
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