Reading fluency

Recently, I started thinking about prior work I have done with students in building their reading fluency. I wanted to work that component of language into my ESL classes. In the library, I found a very basic Scholastic text, Building Fluency: Lessons and Strategies for Reading Success, by Wiley Blevins. My previous work in reading fluency was at the middle school level; this book taught me much about building reading fluency with elementary students. One of the ways to give the students a formative assessment involves timing how long students take to read a list of simple, high frequency words, like “was.” Other sections of the book reinforced teaching strategies I was already familiar with. Unfortunately, the resources I most longed for were not included in the book. In order to teach reading fluency regularly, you need a stack of grade-level texts that may be written on. Compiling this prose from library books would be quite tedious. Then, I found a website maintained by the University of Oregon. This site provides educators with free access to grade-level appropriate texts and assessments.

My second grade students have begun to practice their fluency skills. I am excited to see how they progress. The Scholastic text encouraged giving students texts that were premarked with phrasing cues. I thought my students were ready to do this during guided instruction time with me. The first lesson proved they can do it with help, and I think it allows them a more analytic approach to text, asking them to look at grammatical structures and punctuation.