Fluency

Wow! Time has flown by this year! I haven't updated this in so long but one of my resolutions is to become better at updating, so here goes.

My little group of 2nd graders have been AMAZING this year. I am blown away at the great readers that I have in my class. Unfortunately, I still have a few friends who struggle with their reading skills. Improving their fluency was a big part of this school year and based on assessments, most of them have shown significant growth! So excited! I am passionate about fluency and stress to parents that it is a very important component to their children's understanding of what they read.

I began using fluency passages for homework last year and that seemed to help many of my struggling readers. I would love for all of them to have help from parents at home so that they could hear their children read, but I know that it isn't always feasible. Each year is an improvement on the last in teaching, so this year I also added a fluency center in my literacy time. I use poems and short passages that follow our unit of study. The students work with a partner and read it once to themselves silently. Then they take turns reading to a partner. Finally, they read the passage together. It is a very simple center to set up and maintain throughout the week.

Occasionally, I will have fluency assessments for my struggling readers and students with IEPs. There are some simple assessments you can perform with them 2-3 times each. I do not have a teaching assistant in my room and it can get difficult to pull these students over for an assessment each week. I try to get an initial read with them, using a timer and recording mistakes and omissions on Monday. They practice reading the passage with their partners and then Wednesday or Friday, I will pull them back over to read again to see check for improvement. These are good for documentation for students who are having difficulty with their reading.

Another activity I use is a flipbook for nonsense word fluency. We do not assess NWF after the beginning of the year, but we still progress monitor this skill with struggling readers. I created several notebooks for a NWF center. For each notebook, I wrote a letter (a-z) on a flashcard and punched a hole at the top of the card. I put the consonants on the first and third ring and the vowels in the middle (making sure that the combinations didn't create a word that was inappropriate!). Then the students will flip the cards to create CVC words and make a list of real and nonsense words. They have to read the word and write it in the list where it belongs. My students love it! I'll add pictures later because the notebooks are at school and we've been out since Monday because of inclement weather here in NC.

There are so many great resources for fluency passages online. I have bought several packets from teachers on TPT and have created some of my own using excerpts from stories and books I already have in my classroom.

I hope this helps give you an idea of how I am working on improving fluency with my students.