Tuesday Tip - Improve Fluency

In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss helping struggling readers improve fluency by identifying and underlining text, fostering independent thinking and fluency development.

Video Transcript

Welcome to this week's Tuesday Tip. Now you might not know, but I've worked with struggling readers for about 15 years now. Actually they're my favourite students to work with. And one of the things that I see happen with them is they learn the phoneme-grapheme correspondence. They learn their word level reading, but then when we put those graphemes to work. In text, the fluency can be drastically reduced because there's so much to think about.

One of the little tricks that I've come upon that has really worked for many of the students I've worked with is to review the text before they read. Not just to look at it or to have a trial run of reading, but to actually find the digraphs and trigraphs within the passage and underline it first. So in this passage, the student would underline the th, the ir.

Got a split diagraph there, E Y, or A, you get the idea. Now you could provide the passage already marked up, and I have seen that, but I think by providing it for them, we're actually robbing the students of an opportunity to do some really great thinking for themselves. Part of building fluency in text is being able to instantly identify those digraphs and trigraphs so that they can read the words fluently.

And so this, and that all happens really unconsciously in a fluent reader. But for our strugglers, this here can be a little step, a bridge, a step, scaffold to help them build the fluency. They will need this for a little while, and then they won't. You'll get to the point where they're only going to mark up the new graphemes that they've been learning, and it can be an absolutely fantastic support.

Now, not all students will need this. This is one of those tier two supports that you might put in place for your struggling or potentially struggling readers in your classroom. Happy teaching everyone.

Want to know more?

Click here to find our more about Figuring Out Fluency.

Click here to find our more about Supporting Students Struggling with Fluency.

And click here to Move on From Sounding Out.

Ready to help struggling readers with their fluency?  Join the Resource Room today.