What is fluency and why is it important?

 Fluency is the “sound” of the reading. It is composed of reading rate (the speed), inflection (using punctuation to read), and expression (natural sounding voice, not robotic).

Close to half of all readers aren’t fluent, but fluency matters. Fluent readers read more accurately, retain more of what they’ve read, develop deeper understandings, infer more readily, and focus their attention on the ideas in a text.

This is a chart for determining if a reader is fluent…

A sample of a fluent reader…J

To encourage reading rate

-give a timed passage, record time it is read, and then repeat with same passage and keep a chart of the improved time

To encourage inflection and expression

-read to the child often

-teach the comma means to pause, period stop, exclamation point is excitement, and question mark raises the voice at the end

-get books on tape for the child to listen to (borrowed from the library works great)

-do reader’s theaters-where different folks have different characters

-after the child understands that he/she should read every word-he/she should not point as he/she reads anymore (about the middle of reading first grade level texts)

-take chunks of 2-4 words that go together in phrases and put on cards, have the child read them like flash cards, for example…he went, out the door, in the sky.

Wishing you homeschool blessings,