Literacy ideas and resources - Tales from Outside the Classroom

A Close Look at Reading Fluency with Read Alouds text with girl with magnifying glass

A Close Look at Fluency: Read Alouds

I’m continuing to look at ways to improve my students’ reading fluency using The Fluent Reader by Tim Rasinski. In this post, I explore building reading fluency through read alouds. You can also read my post on building fluency through supported reading and an introduction to The Fluent Reader. As with nearly everything in teaching students, fluency should be taught and practiced following a gradual release model. (Note: Links in this post are affiliate links)

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A Close Look at Fluency

I’ve always believed fluency is an important, and often overlooked, area of reading. I’ve read quite a bit about fluency over the last few years, have heard Dr. Tim Rasinski speak quite a few times, and even had him give me feedback on something I created (more on that later). If you’re not familiar with Dr. Tim Rasinski, he is known as a reading researcher with a focus on reading fluency. I’ve had as a

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Word Work in the Middle Grades

As a third grade teacher, I find that my word work center activities cover a variety of skills. I want my students to review and refine their sight word knowledge specifically focused on the correct spelling of many high frequency words. I want them to apply the phonics skills from the previous years and our current year’s instruction. I want them to begin to recognize and apply affixes and have a base level understanding of

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Teaching Affixes

Each year I teach affixes throughout the year in context. However, we also focus on it during our spelling practice throughout the year. To introduce prefixes, suffixes, and roots, I created this tree and display it as an anchor chart in our classroom above our word wall. Then, as we come across different affixes, we add them to our word wall. This keeps them fresh in students’ minds throughout the year, and also gives us

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Assessing oral reading fluency text next to printed fluency rubric laid on pink paper

Oral Reading Fluency Rubrics for Assessments & Grading

Many, many years ago, I was a reading teacher in a K-5 building. We revamped our report cards that year to be very standards focused. Indicators based on the standards were broken apart into the report card and each received their own score which then made up the overall grade. One of the teachers came to me and said…”How do you grade fluency?” We talked things through and couldn’t come to a solid opinion on

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