Fluency Practice

AWWW…. fluency.  Such a little word that means so much.  We want them to read with expression, phrasing, intonation, and at a good pace.  Most of my beginning readers struggle with fluency.  We read a book the other day and it lent itself to some good expression.  Actually, they needed to read it with good expression and reading the punctuation for the story to make perfect sense to them.  I was having a hard time getting them there… so, this is what I came up with.

There were three characters in this story- Sam, Jesse, and Papa.  I have multiple copies of this book and highlighted each one separately.  I gave one student the book with Sam’s speaking parts that were highlighted with highlighter tape.  I gave another the book with Jesse’s parts and another with Papa’s parts.  Last, I gave a student a book and they acted as the narrator (those parts were also highlighted).  Basically, I turned our guided reading book into a readers theater.

We practiced reading fluently, practicing together along the way.  As I said, there were many parts where the students had to read the punctuation to fully understand this story and this definitely helped get them there (at least somewhat:) 

(Just in case you are curious, this book is a level F and is called The Soccer Game.  It is part of an intervention program called Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI) by Fountas and Pinnell.)  These books are amazing!  

Just thought I would share one way of practicing fluency in a guided reading setting.