Teach Reading Through Your Read Alouds
Wednesday, May 16th, 2012

The Read Aloud is more than simply a means of entertaining students or a way to get through a text with the whole class at the same pace. When done well, the Read Aloud is a highly-effective teaching strategy for both fluency and comprehension. [read more...]

Reading Movie Scripts
Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

Movie scripts are a powerful tool to teach predicting, questioning, visualization, characterization, point of view, irony, and more. Movie scripts require comprehension skills beyond just reading what the characters say aloud. [read more...]

Joke Books Make Fabulous Fluency Texts
Thursday, April 28th, 2011

Joke telling is a fabulous way to provide your students oral fluency practice. Jokes are meant to be read/told aloud. Through joke telling you can help students focus on pacing, stressing the right words, and reading in a smooth, fluid manner. [read more...]

Fluency Practice with Television
Monday, October 25th, 2010

Without reading regularly, students slowly lose the speed and momentum they've gained, resulting in a backwards slide. But when they're not in school for the weekend or over the summer, what can they do? Television could be the answer.[read more...]

Reading Punctuation is Essential for Fluency
Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

It's not uncommon for students to look at punctuation as nothing more than annoying little marks a teacher makes them use. The key is to get students to understand that punctuation is for the reader, not the writer. Punctuation aids the reader in understanding the writer's intended message. [read more...]

Recognizing Print Styles Increases Automaticity
Monday, February 15th, 2010

One aspect of reading fluency is automaticity. Students see a word and just say it—they no longer have to sound it out. In the classroom, primary teachers work on this constantly, but what about reading in the real world? The letters look different. [read more...]

Target Reading Rate with Closed Captioning
Friday, October 23rd, 2009

Reading fluency is a huge component to increasing comprehension. If students spend too much energy decoding the words, they can’t focus on what the words mean. If students read too slowly, they will never make sense of the text. Fluency is something most primary teachers [read more...]

Tracking Words While Reading
Friday, January 23rd, 2009

Young readers often need help following the words in a book from left to right without losing their spot. Teachers often provide a tracking tool for students to place below the line of text they are reading. However, this tracking strategy creates a problem for many students’ fluency. [read more...]

Introducing Fluency to Students
Monday, October 27th, 2008

Even if students can decode words in their reading, that doesn’t mean they will comprehend what they read. If they read too slowly, then the text doesn’t make sense. If they don’t chunk words in phrases, breathing at punctuation marks, then the text doesn’t make sense. If they [read more...]

Utilize the Internet for Free Audio Books
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

For the classroom teacher who doesn’t have books on CD readily available, check out these two favorite websites that include authors and actors reading aloud popular children’s literature includes numerous poems written and then [read more...]

Building Phonics Skills with Word-Cup Makers
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

Throw away those construction paper sliders, primary teachers! Instead, try word-maker cups. Stack two large Styrofoam coffee cups so their lips fit together and can be rotated. The lip of one cup contains the beginning consonant blends [read more...]

Tackling Obscure Proper Nouns in Reading
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

Utilizing their typical decoding strategies of sounding out every letter, students will get bogged down. Not only will it be difficult to get through the text in a reasonable amount of time, but comprehension breaks down when the reading fluency [read more...]

Hearing Punctuation
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

Without smooth fluency, students will struggle to read and comprehend. Fluency is the bridge between decoding and comprehension. Many teachers associate speed or reading rate with fluency. That’s true, if a student reads too slowly or too [read more...]