Find ways to read, write, and tell stories together with your child. Always applaud your young reader and beginning story writer! The tips below offer some fun ways you can help your child become a happy and confident reader. Try a new tip each week. See what works best for your child.
The reader’s theater strategy blends students’ desire to perform with their need for oral reading practice. Reader’s Theater offers an entertaining and engaging means of improving fluency and enhancing comprehension.
ELLs can benefit from Reader’s Theater activities in a number of ways, including fluency practice, comprehension, engaging in a story, and focusing on vocal and physical expression. Kristina Robertson offers a number of approaches to Reader’s Theater with ELLs in this article.
It’s called lots of different things: Drop Everything and Read (DEAR), Sustained Silent Reading (SSR), and Million Minutes to name a few. Regardless of the different names, the intent is the same — to develop fluent readers by providing time during the school day for students to select a book and read quietly. Nearly every classroom provides some time during the instructional day for this independent silent reading. Despite its widespread use in classrooms, silent reading hasn’t enjoyed much support in the research literature.
Screening, diagnosing, and progress monitoring are essential to making sure that all students become fluent readers — and the words-correct per-minute (WCPM) procedure can work for all three. Here’s how teachers can use it to make well-informed and timely decisions about the instructional needs of their students.
Three main accomplishments characterize good readers. Find out what these accomplishments are, and what experiences in the early years lay the groundwork for attaining them.
Beginning readers are not usually fluent, but classroom practices can help them develop this important skill. This article describes both direct and indirect methods for increasing fluency through classroom instruction.
Learn what reading fluency is, why it is critical to make sure that students have sufficient fluency, how we should assess fluency, and how to best provide practice and support for all students.
Explore how to use children’s poetry to encourage kids to read. You might start with poems from celebrated poets like Jack Prelutsky, Shel Silverstein, Judith Viorst, and Eloise Greenfield.
In today’s schools, too many children struggle with learning to read. We must become well-versed in science-based reading instruction in order to affect school-wide policy. And for our children, we must be sure they are receiving the best possible instruction in reading.
Guided oral reading is an instructional strategy that can help students improve a variety of reading skills, including fluency. This article explains how to implement it in your classroom.
Fluency, reading in a fast and fluid manner, is what often distinguishes to observers the reading performance of a good reader from a poor reader. Find out what the research says about the two most common instructional methods for developing fluency: guided oral reading and independent silent reading.
