Reading fluency

[Mom-ninja.]

What is a good way to improve fluency?

 

My ds was just tested today, and the woman said he needs to improve his fluency (which I knew of course). She heard my 6 yr old reading as well and said the same about him.

 

I have the Victory Drill book and they hate it. Hate it with a capital H. I have word lists from their reading curriculum, but they don't like reading those either. They say reading word lists over and over is boring.

 

Should I just make them read word lists anyway? How do you work on fluency?

 

They do read a loud to me or DH every evening for 15 or 20 minutes.

[Mom-ninja.]

Bump......because the forum moves too fast!

[Alenee]

IMO, their reading aloud every day and assigned reading should be enough, especially regarding the 6yo.

 

I loathe the way people try to box children into a set timeline for reading fluency. The ps's are a perfect example of children learning at different rates.

 

Just be diligent in giving them every opportunity to read and their fluency, unless they have learning disabilities, will most definitely improve over time.

[hornblower]

I did what I think is called 'guided reading'.

 

I read a passage out loud, kid read the same passage out loud right after me.

 

Not word lists, but just selections out of good books at a level they can handle.

 

At the beginning, you can start with just one sentence at a time. You want to hear them sounding pretty much like you do. I didn't make them repeat if they sounded stiff or stumbled. Just praised (helped with any word they got stuck on) and went on to the next sentence.

 

Repeat, repeat, repeat, and gradually build up to a paragraph & severl paragraphs in a row.

 

With my ds I continued pretty intensive phonics instruction at the same time because he was (is) still stumbling over longer words. He's just finished doing the Pyramids books from Phonics Pathways. Chunking, syllabication - all that was important for him to get the fluency up.

 

hth :)

[Mejane]

I used the strategies from this website with my son. They helped tremendously.

 

http://busyteacherscafe.com/literacy/fluency.html

[rafiki]

.

[Guest]

One way to improve fluency is to have the kids read something "at their comfort level," which means simple enough that they can read through it without getting stuck more than once or twice (no frustrations) and just enjoy the flow of the story or the information, whatever they prefer. You want the general flow and stamina to improve slowly. This is pleasure reading, not reading to learn how to tackle unfamiliar words or take in new, more complex information. Take them to a bookstore or library and just let them loose, watching to see what holds their interest, what they sit and read through and what they put aside.

 

Kids can find unusual material for working on fluency if it's their own choice. My daughter had an attraction to catalogs and would sit over them at the breakfast and lunch table for hours on end reading the blurbs about the toys and other items for pets, or in book catalogs (Chinaberry is good for this). I know another child who absolutely was mesmerized by her mother's copy of Gray's Anatomy (the mother was a nurse). My husband read large-print Reader's Digests when he was about your son's age. Whatever they are drawn to is good for this purpose. What you want is a child sitting down and doing free reading, for pleasure and interest, around half an hour a day -- try not to time it or expect a certain amount to get "finished," because that's a way to spoil it. Perhaps set up big pillows and baskets of books to snuggle down with after lunch, or allow them to read at the table if you don't mind mixing books with meals.

 

By the way, I would expect almost all six-year-olds to need to build fluency, so that comment wasn't exactly helpful for you! And it also seems to me that there is a huge difference between oral reading skills and silent reading, which most kids do by age 9. When my daughter was evaluated at this age the evaluator had her read silently and observed her eye tracking, then chatted with her about what she had read (a passage of her choice from one of her own books). A lot of kids are not great oral readers, but do quite well silently. It varies. If you feel your kids are struggling, you may want to pursue a more in-depth evaluation of their reading skills.

Edited June 29, 2010 by Guest

[RamonaQ]

I have really liked paired readings (ds not so much so). You choose something at their reading level, sometimes I have ds read it first (usually not because he finds this so dull), and then we read it together, I set the pace and he reads with me-- there is some stumbling. Aim for about 10 minutes a day.

 

Another thing I have done is after a paired reading, I have ds read me the passage as fast as he can, which I think really helps.

[Perry]

I used the strategies from this website with my son. They helped tremendously.

 

http://busyteacherscafe.com/literacy/fluency.html

:iagree:

 

The techniques listed on that page are all good.

 

Reading fluency at 3rd grade (and probably earlier) is predictive of reading fluency and comprehension in high school. So I disagree with the idea that kids develop at their own rate, and it will just get better on it's own. It might, but it usually doesn't improve without intervention.

[Mom-ninja.]

 

Reading fluency at 3rd grade (and probably earlier) is predictive of reading fluency and comprehension in high school.

 

 

That statement makes me feel sick. :001_unsure: I can still "fix" my older ds's slow choppy reading, right? Ugh.

 

 

I'm going to check out every book on CD I can find from the library. I already read aloud to them daily. They read aloud to me daily, but now I will do the paired/guided reading as well.

 

Has anyone done a word wall? She mentioned making one. I saw it also on the site Mejane suggested but I haven't looked closely at it yet.

Edited June 30, 2010 by Kleine Hexe

[Guest]

Reading fluency at 3rd grade (and probably earlier) is predictive of reading fluency and comprehension in high school.

 

There are actually surprising numbers of kids who don't learn to read at all until after age eight. Typically, they then go from sounding out words to reading adult-level books within weeks. The evidence in this country is largely anecdotal, because it's impossible to set up a controlled experiment for this type of thing and because we push reading at early ages.

 

There are a number of other countries who do not even introduce formal reading instruction until age seven. From statistics I've seen (repeatedly), these countries have high literacy rates and very low rates of reading disabilities.

 

I suspect that the reason this statement about 3rd grade as a predictive stage is largely because at that level teachers STOP TEACHING READING and, assuming kids are readers, begin to use reading to teach content that is unfamiliar and more difficult. It is very, very rare for kids to get instruction in any kind of literacy strategies or reading techniques past third grade.

 

So please, please do not panic because your child is nine and not ORALLY fluent. There is a difference between reading aloud and reading silently, a difference I have read about and observed in my own child at that age. In her case, she could actually read silently so much faster than she could verbalize the text that it came out garbled and choppy -- her actual reading level was years and years higher when tested differently. I don't mean that this is necessarily always the case; I just mean that there are a lot of factors at work and a lot of ways to test what is going on besides relying on oral fluency.

 

If you are truly concerned, have your child checked by someone who specializes in developmental learning and who will gather more evidence than having your child read aloud.

[Mom-ninja.]

Thanks KarenAnne. It's good to hear the reminders of places that teach "late" reading. I get caught up in trying to get my ds caught up, if you will, that I forget.

 

It's been a long hard struggle getting him to be able to read. It wasn't until just this past school year that he learned to read past CVC and other short words. I'm thrilled that he is now reading early chapter books. He is still getting reading instruction. I've just started REWARDS. Of course now I'll add in those other components as well.

 

I think I'll brush off the word lists as well, and throw those in every so often.

[MariannNOVA]

The article and link are below. Our library has a 'Therapy Dog Reading Program' -- my kids go and read to the dogs simply because they love to, but I've talked to other moms whose children sign up to read to the therapy dog and they all have told me that they began doing it to improve their child's reading fluency.

 

DS had difficulty with fluency between first and 2nd grade - having him read aloud worked better than anything (after having his eyes checked to make sure the problem wasn't visual). He would read to his stuffed animals or he would just read silently OR aloud. It also is important for the child to have someone read fluently to them so they understand what fluent reading is.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/186708.php

 

 

Dogs Helped Kids Improve Reading Fluency

 

Researchers in the US found that reading to dogs helped children improve their fluency by up to 30 per cent. Many animal organizations and libraries in the US already have reading improvement schemes where they pair up children and dogs, but until now the evidence has been more anecdotal than research-based.

 

The findings are the result of a collaboration between the University of California Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and Tony La Russa's Animal Rescue Foundation of Walnut Creek, California. Together they studied participants of the Foundation's already established animal assisted therapy scheme called the All Ears Reading Program, according to a statement released by UC Davis earlier this month.

 

Lead researcher Martin Smith, a veterinary school science educator with UC Davis, told the press that:

 

"The dogs, in contrast to a human, don't judge the individual, aren't grading the individual, and hopefully that allows the children to build some confidence in their reading skills."

 

Smith and colleagues explored changes in reading skills among third graders at school and among home-schooled students. They found reading fluency went up 12 per cent in the school-based students and 30 per cent in the home-schooled students. Reading speeds also increased by up to 30 words per minute.

 

The children regularly read out loud to three shelter-rescued dogs called Molly, Digory and Lollipop (a Chihuahua-terrier mix) from Tony La Russa's Animal Rescue Foundation.

 

The home-schooled children visited the veterinary school campus every week for 10 weeks during which time each child read out loud to one of the dogs for 15 to 20 minutes.

 

One child told the researchers that:

 

"I feel relaxed when I am reading to a dog because I am having fun."

 

Another added that:

 

"The dogs don't care if you read really, really bad so you just keep going."

 

After the study, 75 per cent of parents reported that their child was now reading aloud more frequently and with more confidence.

 

Smith and colleagues proposed that because the children perceived the dogs as patient and non-judgemental, this changed their attitude to reading.

[Murmer]

A couple of thoughts:

Model how the reading should sound and then have him read it back like you did...sometimes choppy readers forget how to make is sound like talking (or like mom).

Break it into phrases and have the child read the phrase quickly and fluently then have them put it together with other phrases to make the sentence.

Use your finger to cover the words making him read faster, so you would move your finger right to left covering up the words he just read and pushing him to look to the next word more quickly make it a race.

[Mom-ninja.]

That is so neat about the therapy dogs. I found it interesting that the home school kids has a bigger improvement. I picture the anxious home school mom (me!) sitting next to the child vs. a brown eyed doggy, and I can see why the doggy would win.

 

I wonder if it would work using my own dog.

 

 

Thanks for all these suggestions.

[Terabith]

Well, I think 5-10 minutes of word reading drill is helpful once they have a handle on decoding. I think I would use the ABeCeDarian stuff for that.

 

I think having them read aloud a bit every day is important. You can practice phrasing and model short passages from that. ("See, this is a question mark. Your voice goes up a little bit when you ask question. Let me read it and then you try again.) I also LOVE the second grade language arts from Time4Learning. They have a lot of emphasis on fluency.

 

I do repeated readings. I have Anna read a passage and I time it, or I set a timer and see how far she gets. Then I read it aloud to her. Then we read it together. Then she reads it again, and I time it.

[Perry]

The evidence in this country is largely anecdotal, because it's impossible to set up a controlled experiment for this type of thing and because we push reading at early ages.

I'm not sure why it would be impossible. :confused: There are many excellent studies on reading acquisition.

 

There is a difference between kids who aren't reading because they aren't taught until they are older, and kids who aren't reading in spite of instruction at younger ages.

 

Unfortunately, fluency is very, very hard to increase in kids who have deficits in rapid naming speed.

 

Torgeson

Another reason for our interest in reading fluency, and one that interacts with the findings

from our study of the FCAT, is that one of the more difficult aspects of reading skill to remediate in older struggling readers is reading fluency. For example, in one very successful intervention study with 3rd to 5th grade students (Torgesen, Alexander, et al., 2001), we showed that intensive remedial intervention could produce very large gains in reading ability in a group of students who began the study with very impaired reading skills. For example, during the 8 week intervention period, the students went from the 2nd to the 39th percentile in phonemic decoding accuracy, from the 4th to the 23rd percentile in text reading accuracy, and from the 13th to the 27th percentile in reading comprehension. However, their reading fluency scores only went from the 3rd to the 5th percentile. When these same students were followed up two years after the intervention, their percentile scores for phonemic decoding, text reading accuracy, reading comprehension, and reading fluency were the 29th, 27th, 36th, and 4th, respectively. While the students in this study were able to substantially “close the gap†with average readers in phonemic decoding, reading accuracy, and reading comprehension, the gap in reading fluency remained essentially unaffected by the intervention.

 

[Perry]

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/186708.php

 

 

Dogs Helped Kids Improve Reading Fluency

I wish there was a peer reviewed article explaining how they chose their subjects and analyzed the data. I would believe it could help shy kids who lack confidence, but I am very skeptical that it would help dyslexic kids or those with rapid naming deficits.

[MariannNOVA]

I wish there was a peer reviewed article explaining how they chose their subjects and analyzed the data. I would believe it could help shy kids who lack confidence, but I am very skeptical that it would help dyslexic kids or those with rapid naming deficits.

 

I agree. I have had kids in my classroom with dyslexia and other issues (tracking, convergence) and it is a whole other ball of wax. One mom I met did tell me she was using it as a confidence builder for her 'shy' little boy. At our library, a child will read to the same dog every session and the dog owners notice alot and are able to comment astutely on the progress the little readers are making.

[AngieW in Texas]

Timed repeated readings are the standard for fluency work.

 

Start with passages that are below his current reading level.

 

I used the DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency Passages. When my dd was reading at 2nd grade level, I started with the 1st grade level passages.

 

I'm going to just cut&paste something I wrote before about doing timed repeated readings with my dd.

 

timed, repeated readings

The tutor said that I should shoot for a reading speed of 100 correct words per minute (cwpm). I used the DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency Passages that are online. You have to register, but registration is free. The tutor said to start with the 1st grade level and keep working through the passages until we got to a level my dd couldn't read. We were to repeat each passage for as many days as necessary for her to get to 100cwpm. I had my dd attempt each passage 3x each day. I think it took her three days to get through the first passage at 100cwpm. For the first reading, I had her read the entire passage while I timed her. Then I figured out her time. For the second reading, I had her read out loud at the same time that I read out loud, but I was trying to read at about 100wpm. I had the timer going and stopped at one minute. I got to where I was pretty good at hitting between 100 and 110 wpm each time. It's actually hard to read that slowly, so you have to watch the timer and where you are in the passage so you don't read too fast. The third time, my dd had to read it on her own again for just one minute. If she made it past the 100th word and had 100 or more words correct, then we started a new passage the next day. Otherwise, we repeated that same passage again the next day. We never did an old passage and a new passage on the same day. Any time she hit over 100cwpm, she was done with timed reading for the day. She didn't manage 100cwpm on her first try until she was about halfway through the 2nd grade passages. There are 20 passages for each grade level at DIBELS. We spent her whole third grade year reading through the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade passages.

[chiguirre]

I just wanted to thank you all for the links and advice. Ds is working through Rewards this summer (waving to you Kleine Hexe) and building fluency is our next big task. I thought it was very interesting that poor oral readers stay poor oral readers, but that their other reading scores are much higher in Perry's cited article. While I'd like ds to be able to read fluently out loud, I'm glad that the lack of rapid naming ability doesn't have as big an impact on silent reading comprehension as I'd feared.

 

Oh, and KH, Rewards does have some fluency work towards the end of the book. Ds isn't there yet, so I'm not sure how effective it is, but it might be the best place for you to start since you're using it anyway.

[Guest]

There are a number of stories on the special needs boards of kids being taught reading skills and not experience that "click" in terms of fluency, speed, and stamina, until nine or later. You might try a thread search if you're interested. The evidence is there, although as I said it's anecdotal.