Fluency

My students are currently working on fluency in the classroom during whole group instruction and guided reading time. Fluency contains numerous components, including automaticity and prosody. Automaticity is when one can recognize words effortlessly, while prosody is a feature of expressive reading and can aid with comprehension. My students are working on both automaticity and prosody, so they can become fluent readers. Many of my 3rd graders are at a 1st grade reading level. Rasinski writes that “students’ excessively slow reading requires double and triple the time of more skilled readers to make it through the same reading assignment (Rasinski, 2000)”. I can connect this back to my field experience for my slow readers. My CT gives planned time for reading in the classroom every day. I circulate the classroom during this time to help students stay on task and to provide support when needed. Classrooms That Work states that setting time aside for meaningful reading provides children with daily experiences with words and is a part of making a class effective! The daily reading time lets children improve their fluency and get more exposure to books. This is needed for my students who come from a non rich print enivoment.

My CT has a Classroom Fluency Snapshot in her room to access the student data. The CFS is an assessment that shows clearly how a student's reading rate compares with others in the class. This can establish baseline data and help monitor progress students make over time. This is from Fluency: Strategies and Assessments, which helps teachers strength students' fluency skills. My CT collects all fluency data in a notebook and then pulls select students to practice fluency during independent reading time.

During independent reading time, I pull students aside to work on fluency with them. We play a game to build sentences to improve fluency. The students build and read repeated phrases to give them practice reading decodable and non-decodable words with fluency. This helps with automaticity, as students are working towards recognizing the students effortlessly. This is also a formative assessment for me to see the students learning and monitor it.

In Classrooms That Work that authors write about doing a word wall. This is not the same as a having word wall, and this changed my thinking about how a word wall should be used in the classroom. Teachers who do word wall are selective about the words on the wall, add the words gradually, practice the wall by chanting/writing the words, and do numerous review actives to give students practice with the words. Student can glance at the words during both reading and writing time when struggling with troublesome words. The activities that back up the word wall will make the recognition of this words autonomic. I have been doing these activities with my students during transition times to help them become more familiar and comfortable with the words. Over time, the students will learn to read and spell all the words on the wall. This positively affects fluency, as children can instantly and accurately identify high frequency words by “doing” the word wall!

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