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Developing Fluency: Read Fluently Like a Fastball!

            Rationale: Fluency is an important step for learning readers to take so they can begin developing a sight word vocabulary at a more rapid pace and build confidence in their reading ability. This lesson aims to build this skill by repeated, timed readings of Curious George Plays Baseball within peer groups. Students will review one another’s reading with a fluency checklist sheet. Students will also participate in a reader’s theater activity to develop expressive reading skills.

 

Materials:

Timer/Stopwatch

Fluency Checklist Sheets for each student

Copy of Curious George Plays Baseball for each student

Pencil for each student

 

Procedure:

  1. Today we will be taking steps toward becoming more fluent readers. Do you know what it means to be fluent? It means that when we read, we can read fast while still understanding the words and the story. When we can read fluently, it becomes more and more fun to read because we can recognize the words immediately instead of having to sound them out letter by letter!

  2. Now I’ll show you how to practice being more fluent when you read. Let’s look at this sentence together. (the sentence is I knocked on the door) Let’s start out by decoding the words. I /k/ /n/ /o/ /ck/ /ed/ on the /d/ /oo/ /r/. Hm. That didn’t make much sense. Why don’t we go back and think about what word might make sense there. What do we do on doors? Ah-ha! We knock on doors! I knocked on the door! Now that I know the words, I can go back and read the sentence faster this time, and the more times I practice, the faster I can get. That’s fluency!

  3. Now you are all going to team up with a partner and read Curious George Plays Baseball. You may be familiar with Curious George. He is a little monkey who goes on fun adventures with his friend the man in the yellow hat. Today they are going to a baseball game. George is curious if he can play ball with the team so he sneaks into their dugout…and gets caught! What’s going to happen to George? We’ll find out with our fluent reading!

  4. You will each read the book two times in a row. The other student will listen closely and take special note of how fast or fluent their partner reads. You also have a fluency checklist that lists four things that are very important for fluent readers to do each time they practice: remembering more words, reading faster, reading more smoothly, which means they don’t stop as long between words, and reading with more expression, which means their face and voice changes with what’s happening in the story, so they might look happy when something good happens in the story, or they might give characters different voices! After they read the second time, you’ll check off each of these things that you noticed they did better on their second time reading than their first.

  5. One last thing before you begin, don’t forget the trick I showed you at the beginning of our lesson of going back to reread tough words to see what makes sense with the rest of the sentence and you can figure out the word! This is called cross-checking and its something that will be super helpful in becoming a fluent reader!

  6. (Allow students to complete their readings and checklists) So how did everyone do? If you did well in all the categories, that’s amazing! If there were some you didn’t do as well in, don’t worry! You’ll get plenty more practice to get there.

  7. Our next activity will be quick. We’re going to do a quick reader’s theater. A reader’s theater is kind of like turning a book into a play. This means we should use lots of expression and be as fluent as we can! We won’t perform the whole book today but I’m going to choose 3 volunteers to read one page each, remembering to be as expressive and fluent as possible like you’re performing in a movie!

  8. After reader’s theater is over, have each student read the book to you individually and time them to calculate their words per minute and save this for future assessment if it’s the first time you’ve done this or use it to assess their improvement from their last fluency activity. Ask them questions about the reading to assess comprehension.

  1. Why did the team and umpire chase after George?

  2. How was George able to catch the ball that looked like it was going to hit Jimmy’s mother?

  3. What did the team do to George after he caught the ball?

 

References:

Following the Path to Fluency by Sidney Richards

https://sidrich2016.wixsite.com/mysite-1/growing-independence-and-fluency

 

Fluency sheet:

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