Fluency Instruction and the Magic of Poetry
Fluency refers to accurate reading at a speed that is easy for an audience to listen to and is read with expression dictated by the author’s punctuation.
Fluency Fast Facts
Lack of automaticity or fluency in reading results in the reader expending significantly more working memory to decode words, often causing a decline in comprehension.
Automaticity frees up our working memory and allows the reader to spend their energy understanding and connecting with the meaning of the text.
Fluency follows a sequence where one building block relies on the mastery of the preceding one. Working through this sequence builds a bridge from decoding to comprehension.
A key strategy for developing fluency in our struggling readers is guided repeated reading. This strategy stresses repeating the same text until the student reaches their accuracy, rate, and expression goal. “Guided” repeated reading means the student hearing the text read by a good model, corrections of word miscues after each repetition, and suggestions for expression provided between readings. Modeling, and immediate corrections are critical for our struggling readers.
BONUS TIP!!! The Magic of Poetry
(This is one of our secret weapons at Roadways Literacy Studio… we LOVE poetry!) Choral reading of poetry is an engaging way to practice sight word fluency, as well as reading in meaningful phrases. Using different voices, soft and loud, brings your poetry to life and provides on opportunity to stress the use of expression in daily reading. Here is one of our favorite poems to try with your students!
Poetry Instruction Tips:
Choose a poem with strong rhythm for choral reading. Use soft and loud voices, accenting particular words, and add in body percussion.
Start by teacher modeling the reading of this poem.
Focus on one stanza at a time, as you repeat several times with your students reading along with you.
Add in body actions to help the students remember the words. They will have fun thinking up actions that are suggested by the words of the poem.
After students become familiar with the words of the poem, have them help you decide where your voice should be soft and where it should be LOUD!
Now put it all together with voice variations and body actions.
Another added step would be to introduce rhythm instruments. Carefully choose instruments that make soft and loud sounds, to be played on the soft and loud words in the poem. Keep the beat or the rhythm using your different instruments.