Moving Beyond Sounding Out Words

Hey everyone! 

It's Pam from Mrs. P's Specialties to bring you some ideas about helping students move from individual sounds to fluently blending and reading words.

In my class we work on reading "smoothly".

    Smooth readers

            *Read at a steady pace and do not pause over and over.                                            

            *Read a whole sentence at a time.  They don't reread words over and over.                      

            *Are easy to listen to read to and understand.                                               

Instead of talking about becoming fluent readers we moved to using the phrase, "smooth readers". This change in wording helped give my students a picture of what they were striving for.

We practice reading smoothly multiple times a day. Many times we use these quick fluency strips for practice. It helps students who easily become overwhelmed.
To begin with, we build off and review word families.

Then we move on to sentences- again in small strips to make it manageable for the students. 

After 2 to 3 readings of this strip we then talk about what every sentence has....a capital at the start and a period (or other punctuation) at the end. Students then add the proper punctuation.

We also use this strip to talk about rhyming and word families. I generally give a verbal direction on how to mark up the sentence. For example, here I directed the student to underline all of the -at word family words.

This whole session lasted 5 minutes or less, but we were able to work on tons of skills. We worked on fluency, word families, sentence basics, and following verbal directions. Nothing better than quick meaningful instruction! 

Here are some of the other Word Family Fluency Strips students worked on during this time.

I hope you have gotten some tips on how to work on fluency quickly.