I am so excited to have guest, Christy Mattison, facilitating and sharing information on Goal 4!!! Please be sure to respond to Goal 4 in the comments section below.
Goal 4: Teaching Fluency Reading with Phrasing, Intonation, and Automaticity
This
goal is all about fluency! One "ah ha moment" that I had was that it is possible
to be a fluent reader and not comprehend. I love this quote, “It’s important
that in our attempts to teach children to read fluently, we don’t send the
message that reading is just about performing.” I think we often time tell
students to read it smooth, but are we prompting them to read it smooth and
understand it?
I
liked the breakdown of the parts of reading fluency. I feel like I need to focus more on
expression and emphasis. I think my “go
to” prompts are always for phrasing, automaticity, and pace.
I
also liked that she clarifies that students working in levels A-C will not be
reading fluently. She suggests beginning to look for pacing around level D,
phrasing and intonation in levels E-G.
She
cautioned getting students to read with stop watches. This made me think about our Dibels measures
and how they focus on “fluency”.
She
recommends documenting fluency during a running record. (mark pauses with a slash mark)
Here are some
of the lessons that I really liked:
Partners Help to Smooth it Out
I
love the idea of being a “ghost partner”. Many students do not know how to give
positive feedback. This way the teacher can help guide students’ language when
giving feedback.
Warm-Up Phrases
This
made me think about something that our CARE teachers shared with me from a Jenn
Jones conference. After students have mastered reading one word fast, she moves
to phrases. They use index cards, punch 2 holes in the cards, and flip through
the cards while the student reads them.
Here is an example of some possible phrases.
So, when thinking about fluency, what ways do you help students with
fluency?
Fluency is a very dangerous thing if it is not prompted in conjunction with meaning. What a hard habit to break if a reader does not do the thinking but sounds smooth! My favorite strategy to use is having an anchor book for sounding smooth. Find a book with repeated phrases that encourages fluency and have the student read it often! Have the student hear how fluent he/she sounds. Then use that book as a reference when working with the student. Do you sound smooth like when you are reading ______ book. This can be done with a group and that would be their "go to" book for sounding smooth. Modeling, modeling and more modeling also helps. :)
ReplyDeleteI love and agree with what Jenny said about the danger. I do like that Jennifer Serravallo gives rough stages.levels when we should be prompting for phrasing, intonation and expression. At times, I have readers who may fixate on the word they are reading rather than having them practice having their eyes look ahead. I have used the slide card to "chase the words" which was a strategy I learned in Reading Recovery. I typically only use this once I know students are indeed reading for and monitoring meaning. To teach intonation and expression, I have taken the same sentence and used different end punctuation or quotation marks to model how the meaning changes depending on the punctuation. I tell them it is important to read it the way the author intended us to!
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