Instructional Activities for Fluency!

        **This is a great website for Readers Theater!

 http://www.teachingheart.net/readerstheater.htm


        **I also found this awesome example that a 2nd grade teacher uses for choral reading by reciting poetry and songs:

A Poem to Read, A Song to Sing

*Laura Garrett's 2nd graders begin each day with a poem and a song. She introduces a new poem and song each Monday, and the students love rereading and singing the songs throughout the week. She often coordinates poems or songs with science, social studies, or author study units. 

Defining Fluency

           It seems in both articles that the most important part of determining a persons reading fluency is to first define what fluency actually is, so that the measures of fluency are all ranked on the same scale of performance. Rasinski says that there are 3 important dimensions to fluency: (1)Accuracy, (2)automatic processing, and (3)prosodic reading; and Deeney adds two others: (4)comprehension and (5)endurance. If teachers were only to focus on measuring accuracy and rate, for example, they would miss many of the important reading skills that children need to be fluent, and their instruction in the classroom would be based on false interpretations of each child's needs.

        Some solutions suggested for these fluency issues:

• Assisted Readings
• Repeated Readings (improves ALL aspects of fluency)
• Modeling through read-alouds
• Interesting Text
• Parental Involvement
• Performance texts: Poetry, monologues, dialogues, speeches
• Longer passages

Do you think these 5 dimensions of fluency encompass all important aspects of children's fluent reading abilities? Or are there any other things that should be included in this definition of fluency?

Developmental Differences

 In this article, it is said that from birth to age 8 is the most crucial time in life for literacy development. This means that teachers of Kindergarten through 3rd grade have some of the biggest responsibilities to make sure each child gets a good grasp on being able to read and write. The article states that "the single most important activity for building this understand and skills essential for reading success appears to be reading aloud to children." So in order to teach children how to read, you must first have a good foundation of reading aloud to them so that they will be more able to recognize and recreate the words and stories that they are hearing in the classroom. The IRA and NAEYC also realize that the second most important thing that teachers should focus on is the fact that all children develop at different ages and each developmental stage will be different depending on the child's background. Teachers can do literacy digs and pay attention to literacy histories to be able to understand and cater to each child's needs by adapting their teaching styles for each individual student.

Child Developmental Chart

While this may be a more complicated process and take more time and money, it is so crucial to the children's lives and success so it is definitely worth all of the hard work! My favorite part of the article is when they talk about how students should have plenty of opportunity to write with invented spelling and not be corrected. I think this is a good point because if the kid's are excited about writing and brave enough to try new words out, they should not be immediately corrected because it will decrease their self confidence and creativeness and make them not as willing and excited to practice their writing techniques.

Emergent Literacy

         In the "Letting Go of the Letter of the Week" article, I found the most important thing to be the outlook and attitudes of the teachers involved in the Reading Initiative movement. It says that they "decided to let go of a deficit model that looks at instruction by identifying what children do not know" and instead they focused on the positives and told the students what they DO already know in order to boost self-confidence and willingness to learn. Donna Bell used an environmental print wall to show her students how much they in fact already knew coming in to their first year of school.

Students learned to look at the first letters of new words and associate those with the first letters of words that they were already familiar with to get a better phonemic understanding of the word! This also creates a much more meaning based learning rather than simply memorizing letters one at a time.

I thought this was such a great idea because we all know how daunting going into Kindergarten can be, so if on the very first day of school a child can get the feeling that they are indeed already smart, it sets the tone for the rest of the year and the child will be much more willing and open to the idea of learning new things. Another way to keep a student's self-esteem up and keep them confident in their abilities is to focus on "editing and revising" instead of simply correcting their work and telling them that they were wrong. This is what Donna Jarvis focused on in her classroom. She allowed the children to "write" in whatever style they knew (drawing, scribbles, words, etc.) and instead of telling them they were wrong and correcting them right away, she told them that every good writer edits their work and made it a positive experience, so as to not turn students away from feeling like they had failed at the task. She also instilled in her students that fact that writing occurs in everyday life through lists, notes, journals, etc. and encouraged her students to write during any given opportunity.




















             The IRA and NAEYC both realize that the most important thing a teacher can do is to recognize the developmental differences in each of their students. Through such things as literacy digs and literacy histories, teachers can better understand the background and environment that each student is coming from, which will give them insight into their developmental stage and give them ideas on how to best adapt their teaching style for each individual student.