All year long we have worked very
hard to build fluency in our first grade class!
We’ve worked on it by, through and during...
mini-lessons
shared reading
repeated reading
modeling
echoing
independent level books read during Private Reading
See, our school district switched over
to the Teachers College Reading & Writing Project for our Reading (and
Writing) Workshop this year and we’ve been deep in the throes of learning and
implementing all kinds of strategies.
I'm still learning and tweaking and refining but can overall say that I am enjoying the change.
One reason is the increased amount of time we've been able to spend on building fluency.
Recently, I decided we should "put it all together" and take what we've learned about how fluent readers sound and build a continuum.
Over the course of the year we have had all kinds of lessons and practice on elements of fluent reading.
On our continuum, each element has its own color (selected randomly).
Phrasing - Red
Expression - Orange
Pace - Yellow
Punctuation - Green
Self-Monitoring - Blue
I tried to break each element down into a range of 4 levels...AND make it kid-friendly & succinct enough to fit on the 10 x 2.75 pieces of Astrobright
paper I had pre-cut. (And I really didn't want to have to go to the paper cutter a few rooms down to re-cut.)
Do I think my wording is perfect? No.
Do my students know what it means? Absolutely.
So I'm stickin' with it.
K...
So, the wording was already written when I started the lesson.
Sidebar: Could I have spent time with my class generating the qualities of each level instead of writing them out ahead of the lesson? Yep. But I was limited on time and I chose to do it this way, this year.
Since there were five categories, I put the kids randomly into five groups and sent them to their work areas, delivered the cards and the kids got to work, putting the cards from their category in order from 1 to 4 (least to most fluent).
Once the groups had laid them out in order, we traveled around as a whole group to agree and tweak each group's findings.
Here is a close up...
And there you have it - our fluency continuum. What do you love to do to help your readers understand fluency?
Do I think my wording is perfect? No.
Do my students know what it means? Absolutely.
So I'm stickin' with it.
K...
So, the wording was already written when I started the lesson.
Sidebar: Could I have spent time with my class generating the qualities of each level instead of writing them out ahead of the lesson? Yep. But I was limited on time and I chose to do it this way, this year.
Since there were five categories, I put the kids randomly into five groups and sent them to their work areas, delivered the cards and the kids got to work, putting the cards from their category in order from 1 to 4 (least to most fluent).
Once the groups had laid them out in order, we traveled around as a whole group to agree and tweak each group's findings.
Here is a close up...
And there you have it - our fluency continuum. What do you love to do to help your readers understand fluency?