From faltering to fluent

"To read at reasonable pace, with good accuracy and appropriate expression"

Fluency is not about reading as fast as you can.

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When I set out on my 'structured literacy' journey, it may as well have been called 'structured reading.'  At the time, I saw it as a change to how I taught reading, replacing this (what I was doing) with that (what I would do informed by the research.)

Don't get me wrong, it did make a massive impact straight away and it was a huge journey, but I was looking to replace my practice with a neat bow and it simply doesn't work like that.

We changed to a scope and sequence, we became much more explicit and the books we were using became decodable, but despite the changes, I knew I was missing the boat, there had to be more to the Science than this.  

And so, I did another deep dive, I have reflected a lot about that deep dive (of which I am currently on) through this blog and in particular this recent series around literacy.

I dived deeper into understanding the pillars and have come to think that comprehension should be that roof on top, as well as part of the process....but that is for another post.

That dive has taken me into many areas, many of which I have posted about, but today I wanted to reflect on fluency, what it means to me and how I am deliberately providing for fluency development in my classroom.

When it comes to fluency, I am a massive fan of the work of Tim Rasinski and also really like what Nathaniel Hansford has to say on fluency as well particularly around the use of repeated reading.

I enjoy the work of Nathaniel as he brings a very skeptical and scientific lens to approaches, which is always useful.  This article is interesting.

https://www.timrasinski.com/presentations/Reading-Fluency-and-the-Science-of-Reading.pdf

Tim Rasinski has appeared on a number of podcasts and is always interesting to listen to.

From what I have learned about fluency, I think it has a place in our classrooms, being increasingly important as children move to being efficient decoders.  My class are beginning readers being Year 1 and 2 (working from stage 1 - stage 7.2)  therefore fluency activities don't have a major role in our day, but I do intentionally work on fluency in a number of ways.

So how does it look in my class?

Repeated Reading and Performance

We do this in two ways.  Firstly we work on this through oral language, similar to a talk for writing approach.  We have a featured poem, which we learn line by line, in choral fashion.  Not only does this allow us to work on the clarity of what we are saying, it allows me to model expression and performance, which is part of fluency.  As children learn the text, usually 10 - 15 lines long, but could be shorter or longer, I increase the amount we practice at a time.  Woven into this we do quick oral comprehension activities, quickly drawing the parts of the text in sequence, asking children to remember as many key parts of the text as they can and draw them, whatever works with the text.   We also spend time making up questions from the text and retelling it in a variety of ways.

The beauty of this, is it can be done in the pockets of time you have during the day.

Once children can recall it fluently, they practice in pairs or groups, then we will perform it together.  As appropriate I will give the children their own copy of the text, to read it as we perform.  They will also take it home to practice.

There are so many benefits to doing this and it is always beneficial for children to hear how a text sounds being read fluently and then to be able to do this themselves.  I always try to link the text in with our current knowledge development, so that it can also contribute to our growth in vocab.  Over the term we would probably learn three to four texts in this way, but maybe less if the texts are long.  Poems are perfect for this as are nursery rhymes.

To conclude a text we will perform it for an audience, or video it for seesaw.

There is obviously a very strong link to writing here, as children can innovate on the text by writing their own versions.

Just Right For Me Reading

Nothing flashy here, basically it is just time spent reading.  After our handwriting every day, children sit down to read three texts that are just right for them.  I teach them how to work this out, but basically the books are like baby bears porridge.  They must not be too hard, they must not be too easy, they must be just right.  If children have to really work at sounding out more than three words on a page (really work means sound out loud, so you can hear it) then the book is probably too hard.   (don't get me wrong there is a real place for reading easy books to build fluency and they also love to do this.)

They simply sit and read, out loud, but not too loud.  With a buddy, or not with a buddy, they just read.  They usually sit for ten minutes minimum to do this and it gives me time to go around and listen to what they are reading and how they are reading.  They then pick one, two or three of these books to take home and practice in the same way.

Just right for me reading time

Our Decodable Texts

I have blogged about these before, but these are the character texts that we read as part of our whole class literacy.  These texts are broken into three parts, so that by the time children have the whole texts, they have repeated the first part three times and the second part twice.  

We read the text on the screen together.  Children then read the text themselves or to a buddy.  We then read again together and I will read at the end to model how it sounds with expression.

Children always illustrate these, as the texts are used for sentence level comprehension as well, however I find they have had a very positive impact on their fluent reading.  Possibly because they are getting a lot of practice at accurate word reading and loads of repeated reading with many opportunities to map words that can then become sight words.

An example of one of our character texts.

Word Ladders

I got this idea from Tim Rasinski, basically it is a list of words that children read from the bottom to the top and then back from the top to the bottom.  I always ensure the words follow a pattern that we are learning.   These are repeated over the week and help to build accurate word reading.  I also use them for spelling as the children LOVE to test their buddy.

Fluency Sentences

Just as simple as it sounds, a bunch of similar sentences,  but punctuated differently.  For example:

The horse is big.

Is the horse big?

The horse is big!

Children work on reading these with expression.

Or they could look like this

WOW, look at that!

Wow, LOOK at that!

Wow, look at THAT!

Children work out what word to put the emphasis on.

These are fun activities taken from the Mega Book of Fluency which Tim Rasinski co-authored.

I have noticed really great progress this year so far.  My fluency sentence assessments, showed children have all improved at least two stages and their automatic word reading has dramatically improved.  

Fluency is just a tiny part of my literacy programme, but for a tiny part, it packs a big punch!

I really like Tim Rasinski's analogy of fluency being like a bridge to comprehension and made this quick little visual up to represent those ideas.