The Learning Unboxed team discusses the topic of fluency in reading instruction and its critical link to comprehension. Drawing insights from the book, "Shifting the Balance" by Katie Egan Cunningham, Jan Burkins, and Kari Yates, the discussion delved into the various facets of fluency beyond just speed or pace, including accuracy, rate, and prosody. The conversation emphasized the importance of fluency as a bridging process between decoding and comprehension, analogizing fluency to driving where skills improve with practice.
Miscomprehension often stems from fluency issues, and it is recommended that explicit, intentional teaching of fluency is crucial to student success. Teachers are encouraged to stretch their students’ reading level for fluency work rather than sticking to only simple texts. The discussion also touches on building routines for teaching, and assessing fluency, as well as integrating relevant, purposeful texts into instruction. Finally, self-assessment methods for students are also outlined as an important tactic.
Resources
· Reading Models- Reading Rockets
o Nell Duke’s Active View of Reading
o Scarborough’s Rope
· UFLI fluency passages
· LLI kits – for Reader’s Theatre (Classic Tales all have Reader’s Theatre scripts)
· AI tools to create Reader’s Theatre – specifically mentioned Chat GPT
