3 Powerful ways to build fluency with the whole class

��TRT Podcast #174: 3 Powerful ways to build fluency with the whole class

These are simple and powerful fluency routines that you can use throughout the day!

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Hello, this is Anna Geiger from The Measured Mom, and this is the fifth in a series of short, to-the-point episodes that are counting down to the release of my book, "Reach All Readers," on July 23rd, 2024. Today I'm sharing three powerful whole class fluency interventions.

Before I do that, I'd like to share a quick endorsement for the book from Faith Borkowsky. She's the founder of High Five Literacy and co-host of The Literacy View podcast. She wrote, "Anna Geiger doesn't just present the science, she equips educators with practical strategies and resources, translating them into actionable knowledge that can be readily applied in the classroom. Whether you're a seasoned teacher or just starting out, this book empowers you to become a more informed and effective practitioner. Aptly named, 'Reach All Readers' illustrates Geiger's knack for making the science of reading less science-y."

A big thank you to Faith for endorsing the book, and now we'll get into fluency which, according to Deb Glaser and Jan Hasbrouck, is "reasonably accurate reading at an appropriate rate with suitable expression that leads to accurate and deep comprehension and motivation to read."

Fluency is very important because it's the bridge between phonics and comprehension. But we can't fast-forward our way to fluency. It's very important to start with fluency at the letter sound and word level. By the middle of first grade or so when kids are reading connected text with reasonable accuracy, it's time to focus on text-level fluency.

In this episode, I'm going to look at three whole-class ways to build text-level fluency.

Probably the easiest is choral reading, when students read text together with you. This can be done so many times throughout the day. Whether it's choral reading vocabulary words, or choral reading a text that you're going to be analyzing the text structure of, or choral reading a math problem, you can do this all throughout your day.

Another great way to build fluency with the whole class is doing partner reading with paragraph shrinking. You want to pair students up, stronger readers with less strong readers. You could number your students, let's say from 1 to 24. The number 1 would be perhaps the lowest words correct per minute, and then the 24 would be the highest. Split your numbers in half and then line kids up, so student 1 would be with student 13 and so on. Of course, you would never reveal your numbering system to your students. You would just have each of them be a pair of a one and a two.

Get yourself some free passages from ReadWorks or kids could be practicing using decodable texts that they've had in their lesson. You can have the stronger reader begin by reading the text for about one to five minutes, and then the weaker reader reads the same text, even though it may take longer. Then you go back to the stronger reader, and again they can read for a certain period of time. After each paragraph, they're going to stop and summarize, and they can do that together where they name the most important who or what of the paragraph and the most important thing about the who or what. Then they use their fingers to help them put together a summary, an oral summary, that's ten words or less.

I recently did this with a group of second graders and it was amazing how quickly they caught on to this. I had printed a whole bunch of interesting passages from ReadWorks about different animals that were appropriate for a second grade group, and then after modeling it and showing them how to get started, they were on their own and I was walking around the room and supporting them. It's an excellent way to build fluency.

Finally, we have a fluency development lesson. I recently was able to do this with a third grade group. I chose a rather advanced poem that one of my team members wrote for our membership, it was about Katherine Johnson, and I put it up on a screen. We looked at some of the longer words and worked at decoding those. Then I read it a couple of times, the kids read it with me, and then they worked in pairs. One student read it to the other, and then the second student read it to the first student. Then we all did it together for an audience of other adults that were in the room. It was really neat to see how much their fluency improved from the first to the last reading.

Those are three whole-class ways to build text level fluency. You'll get a lot more about fluency in chapter six of my book, "Reach All Readers," which you can get wherever books are sold, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, Bookshop, BAM!, and ThriftBooks. I hope you'll consider pre-ordering. The book is coming out on July 23rd, 2024. I'll talk to you next time!

That's all for this episode of Triple R Teaching. For more educational resources, visit Anna at her home base, themeasuredmom.com, and join our teaching community. We look forward to helping you reflect, refine, and recharge on the next episode of Triple R Teaching.

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The post 3 Powerful ways to build fluency with the whole class appeared first on The Measured Mom.