Hi Everyone, I am a graduate student at Syracuse University in the Literacy Education program. I have been following the listerv for a couple of weeks and appreciated the helpful advice. I read Rosie?s concerns about fluency and wanted to share what I?ve found to be helpful. I do agree with you Rosie ? it does seem natural that when the text becomes more sophisticated and the vocabulary gets tougher, kids may not read as fluently. However, when children given a lot of attention to decoding or word recognition, they use valuable cognitive resources necessary to make meaning of the text, which is why it is so important. When I taught third grade, I found fluency to be one of the greatest needs among my students. With that in mind, I searched for researched-based methods that were proven to be effective. Repeated reading is an example of one technique. You could also use choral reading and echo reading and can vary the pace so that it can be loud and fast or slow and soft. Some teachers have students listen to books on tape, but if it?s going to be effective your students have to be held accountable for what they are reading. I was wondering if you or any one else had heard of the Read Naturally program? It?s a program in which readers hear a passage read by a fluent reading model (either an adult or a tape), they do a cold reading to determine how many words they read per minute, then practice repeated readings of the text and monitor their progress along the way, which I think is essential for them feeling successful and everyone seeing fluency growth. I know of a teacher who used this in her self-contained classroom and was very impressed with it. It might be worth checking out!
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