Some of my priority students are struggling with fluency. They read each. word. like. this. I have been trying several approaches to try to find different ways to help my robot readers. We continue to have "reading to". This is so the children have a modal of what reading sounds like. With a familiar book the children often join in the parts they know and we try to make it sound just like talking.
Being able to recognise sight words quickly at each level and to have graphics of how the children are doing has encouraged many children to keep on learning. This is also helping their fluency. Knowing a lot of sight words is helping to make their reading sound less awkward.
Team one has incorporated into this term's Inquiry topic a lot of fairytales. The children are enjoying making up small "plays" about their favourite part of a fairytale. This helps the children make the scripts come alive through their voices.
We still do choral reading so the children can hear each other read. Children have been heard telling others - "you need to make it sound like talking and not like a robot" as they try to help each other. Also the children are having fun with the repetitive phrases in various fairytales as well as listening to or joining in as a model reads at a good pace and has good phrasing.
As my groups have spread out through the levels I now have some children in a group of their own. This gives me time to be able to read together or do echo reading where I point as I read (as a model) and then get the child do the same. This reading time on their own gives them more confidence to attempt different strategies without the fear of making mistakes in front of their peers.
Being able to record themselves reading part or all, of the text they have read as a group, is a great aid to hearing what they sound like. They can play it back and hear when it sounded good, when it sounded not so good and to discuss why do you think it sound good or not so good. It might be that they had trouble pronouncing a word or how the text said something, was not how they would say it so they slowed down and reverted to word. by. word. reading as they work on each word. These discussions are helpful.
When beginning to learn to read, we get children to point to each word. This gets the children use to seeing that they need to say each word that is written in the text and they can easily see if they are putting in extra words. Running a finger under an unknown word draws attention to that word - you need to take notice of the letters and the order of them to be able to recognise it again. By late red to early yellow books (if not earlier) we want children to drop this habit as the eyes track faster than a finger and reading can become word by word without fluency. Some of my readers have found this a hard habit to break.
We have been practising fluency by also reading up to punctuation or a card, modelling short phrases and getting the children to read it several times to hear the difference. Rereading a familiar book at the beginning of our reading lessons, or by taking them down a level or two it is helping them practise fluency by not having to figure out the words but just to concentrate on fluency has been helpful. Scooping a finger under a group of words to form phrases within a sentence is another way of helping children see how to make a phrase. This is helpful for some being a multi sensory task - the children are using their eyes (visual reading), using their voice (oral speaking) as well as touching (physically scooping along the page) all at the same time but can hark back to finger pointing and be a backward step for others.
Incorrect phrasing and slow word by word reading can impede comprehension. Texts are longer in the higher levels so there is more details to remember. This is our present focus as with end of year testing taking place the children are able to decode but comprehension is letting them down particularly with inference questions.
So what has worked and what hasn't worked? Having a literacy programme that is very focused and teaches children the importance of noticing has helped all my priority learners make progress. This may not have been at a pace that would let them reach expectations after a year at school but they have learnt good strategies to use on unknown words and they have all made progress. Reading each night has also shown the difference between the rate of progress and maintaining it.
What would I do differently? I would like to devote some time to have individualised reading. How this would look and how often it could take place would require some further thought. Reading by themselves is one way to quickly see or hear what strategies they can use, or what they still need to practise, teach only what they need to know and plan "where to from here?" to help them even further.
I would like to implement a similar focussed approach next year. Making the learning of words into a competition has spurred a group of children on to learning a good bank of words to help with their reading and writing. This does take time with setting up lists and then testing but if it is a strategy that helps even just some children it is worthwhile in the long run. The purposeful noticing and explaining what they are doing and why, helps the children to choose what strategy would be best to use on an unknown word.
To be able to enjoy the process of reading and to understand what they are reading, children need to be able to read text accurately, at a reasonable pace and with expression and phrasing. It is to this end we have been systematically working through phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension and fluency this year.
