#readingfluency

Reading simple sentences in a fun way

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl9JE3CmFok 

(fast forward to the 2min mark for reading of text). 

WEEK 9 Tumblr Post 

For my last Tumblr post I have chosen this clip which focuses on reading ‘The cat in the hat’ with expression and fluency. I really love the way in which the students in the clip draw on specific language skills needed to develop expression and reading fluency. The clip also provides a great multi-modal approach by combining both visual and spoken examples. I know myself, that I learn best by observational watching, then applying a kinaesthetic / hands on approach, so I really found this helpful.

I would use this as a mentor text in a reading lesson within my classroom to perhaps demonstrate how the tone and volume within the readers voice can dictate how interesting the book may sound.

Thank you for a fantastic unit this semester.

All the best,

This project is to support fluency in a third grade classroom. I currently have kids who read far below grade level, and am going to be doing an after school program to help them with fluency. I will be using books on CD to help, and I have a whole bunch I’ve bought with Scholastic points, but I don’t have a CD player to play them with!  

Any help is appreciated :)

If you use the code SPARK for the first week your donation will be matched up to $100!

DIBELS      - read a predetermined passage for a set amount of time      - teacher takes notes as kids are reading      - asks comprehension questions after      - benchmarks determined and can be increased by WPM

Teaching reading fluency can be a difficult thing for students to understand. As you probably know, reading fluency is the combination of speed and expression in the reading of a book, passage or other reading material. The faster or more fluently a student reads the better comprehension a student usually has. Their brain as gained the capacity to recognize words quickly, allowing it to focus more attention on the meaning behind the words, phrases, action, etc. A student with poor reading fluency tends to read very choppily and spends a lot of their time and attention on deciphering the words they encounter. By the time they have reached the end of the reading text, the students rarely remembers what they have read in terms of the meaning.

Now, it's one thing to say that a student reads to slowly and with a great deal of choppiness. It's another thing to help students understand what that means. 

Keith, over at the Ed Tech Ideas blog, has a great idea and resources to help with this. He suggests having students use Audacity to record their reading. Using a hand-out, students then listen to themselves and fill in a self-reflection page to help them evaluate their reading. As Keith did this activity, the students began to understand their reading in a variety of ways as he states below:

Some things the students found out about their reading fluency from this activity were:

Pace – some found they read too fast or too slow

Expression – hearing themselves enabled them to decide whether or not their expression conveyed meaning

Punctuation Signals – a lot of students forget to pause at comas and periods

Voice Inflection – when reading narration or dialogue, it’s often difficult for students to change their voice. When they hear themselves reading, they really pick up on this.

It's a great post, and he even includes the materials he uses including the worksheet and the tutorials for using Audacity.

Though he mentions that you can use any variety of personal recorders to record the voices besides Audacity, which can be a bit cumbersome, I would suggest using Vocaroo.