growing fluent firsties

It's that time of year again - time for testing. Time for ACCESS for our ELLs and AIMS Web for our kinder and first grade kiddos. As someone who is new to elementary, I've been learning lots - I did ACCESS with kinders and have been looking at the AIMS Web fluency data with our first grade teachers. Today we were able to sit down and brainstorm some ideas for increasing the fluency in our little readers!

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Of course, we have to start with the data. What follows are two reports we pulled from AIMS Web...

Here is the Tier Transition Report for one of our first grade classrooms:

This report shows the percent of the class at each of the three tiers. When we add the spring scores, we'll be able to compare both triangles (hopefully the Spring one will be all green!)

And below, you can see the Class Distribution by Scores and Levels Report:

In this classroom, we see four kids in Tier 3 and another five in Tier 2. Now that we have this information, what do we do with it?

But before we get there, let's remember that numbers can be deceiving. The report above only tells us how many words were read correct - there is no indication of the inflection of words or a rating on how their reading sounds - too fast? too slow? Like every assessment, there are always limitations, but used in conjunction with others, we can get a bigger picture of the whole child!

So, we've got this data, but now what? What do we do to help children improve their fluency? Here are just a few activities that are easy to implement!

Activities to Build Fluent Readers

Read Aloud
Obviously, firsties need to hear fluent reading every day. If you are not reading aloud to your kiddos, you have to find time to do so. If children never hear how a fluent reader reads, how will they know what kind of reading to mimic? This is only one of the many perks of reading aloud!

Repeated Readings
Another activity is to allow for repeated readings of short texts. This could be a poem or a part of a song or an excerpt from a text you've already read. Repeated Readings allow students to build their automaticity with text and their prosody. Automaticity refers to the ability to read quickly without thinking to much about decoding. Then, when that brain power is freed up, students can spend it thinking about the prosody, or the rhythmic, intoned qualities of the text. Readers read by tending to punctuation, dialog, and even read sentences in chunks, phrasing groups of 3-4 words together that go together. Allowing students to read short texts on a repeated basis allows for practice of inflection!

Click the picture to read more!

Reader's Theater
I'm sure you know all about Reader's Theater - scripts that are built from stories where students all read their "part" like a play. By practicing these together, students can build their automaticity so they can begin to read with inflection. Plus, these are meant to be performed for their classmates, so the Sense of Audience really revs up their engagement!

Tech Time!
If you have access to technology, students can use their devices to record themselves reading. They can do this over time and then reflect on and evaluate their progress. They can also create readings for their peers to listen to! One of my fave bloggers, Colleen over at Literacy Loving Gals also shared a great website today on her Instagram - Vocaroo! This is a website that can be used to record readings and it looks so easy to use!

I'm sure this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as fluency goes - what are your go-to activities to build fluent readers? Let's keep the conversation going...leave me a comment below!

Have a great night!