fluency Archives - Tales from Outside the Classroom

Oral Reading Fluency: Getting Started with SoR

Reading fluency is efficient and effective reading of a text that supports a reader in constructing meaning. It’s displayed through accurate, rapid, and expressive oral reading. Comprehension is the end goal of our reading instruction. But in order to get there, reading cannot be disfluent. If the cognitive load is focused on decoding, there’s not much remaining for building a deep understanding of a text. Or, if expression and phrasing don’t match the syntax, it

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A Close Look at Reading Fluency through Supported Reading- girl with magnifying glass and books

A Close Look at Fluency: Supported Reading

I’m continuing to look at ways to improve my students’ reading fluency using The Fluent Reader by Tim Rasinski. As with nearly everything in teaching students, fluency should be taught and practiced following a gradual release model. When we read aloud we are modeling fluent reading for our students- read more about using read alouds to improve students’ reading fluency. The scaffolding stage, or oral supported reading, gives developing or struggling readers supports from a

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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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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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