Fluency

Fluency is such as complicated concept for some first graders to grasp.  I do a variety of lessons to work on oral reading fluency.  Each week, we work on learning a list of 20 sight words.  By the end of January, the students will have been exposed to and hopefully (fingers crossed) mastered all 220 Dolch sight words.  Each day, we follow a sight word routine from the 95% group.  We go through the words three different times.  The first time, I say the word and they point to the word and repeat after me.  Then, we all say the words together.  Finally, the students say the words by themselves chorally.  At the beginning of the year, we talked about and modelled chorally reading.  Doing the sight word routines together as a class has really helped the students grasp the concept of reading chorally.  This has helped when we read our sight word book of the week together. 

Each week, the students have a mini-sight word story that focuses on several of the words listed on our sight word list for that week.  I absolutely love these books. 

The books are short and sweet.  The books are introductory enough that all students can feel successful.  I LOVE the look on their faces when they read the first book chorally for the first time at the very beginning of the school year.  When the finish the selection, I congratulate them on reading as a class for the first time and they get very excited!!!  They only improve from that day forward.  Each book has several sight words and vocabulary words listed on the front.  We follow the same routine as we do for the sight words.  I read, they read.  We all read together.  They read chorally together.  At the end of each book is a worksheet that takes the sentences from the story and inserts blanks.  The students use the word bank and the story to complete each sentence.  We are almost finished with these little sight word books.  When we are done, we will move onto some other fluency books that are a little more challenging! 

We occasionally have "special vistors" come and read a fluency passage.  The other day, some second graders came and did a reader's theater on the Statue of Liberty.  Our favorite is when fourth grade comes to visit.  The fourth grade teacher takes a fluency passage and turns it into lyrics to fit a popular song.  The kids LOVE it!  I love when other grades come to visit and demonstrate fluency for us because it gives the first graders something to strive for.  We love to get to visit their classrooms in return and demonstrate our fluency!!  What creative ways do you teach fluency?