When thinking about fluency, I think the approach that is most effective for assessing accuracy, reading speed and prosody is a running record. A running record is when teachers calculate the percentage of words the student reads correctly and then analyzes the errors (Thompson, page 86). I think that this method is most effective because you can assess students on multiple components of literacy, with just one reading. I have seen and administered DIBELS testing in my current placement classroom and past placement classrooms, and I think that they are a very quick and accurate way to assess them in fluency.
In my current field placement, I have only seen my CT administer this test a few times, but it was helpful to see what the students were struggling with during their reading. DIBELS testing allows you to get very clear and accurate results, so you know immediately after the test how many words the student got right or wrong, if they corrected themselves, and if they did correct themselves, how they corrected their error. The test is also timed, so it also allows you to see how many words per minute the student is capable of reading.
When I read independently with my students, I have definitely seen a large improvement in all of their fluency since the beginning of the year. Since they are becoming more advanced readers, most of my students have moved on to reading chapter books, which is difficult for some of them. Most students are also able to read first grade high frequency words without any struggle, but some students still lack the skills and confidence of sounding out words that are unfamiliar to them. This has a strong impact on their fluency because when they come to an unknown word, it takes some students almost a minute or two to figure out the word. I think that if my students had more practice with sounding out words and putting the sounds together, they would be able to improve on their word recognition, which in turn, would improve their fluency.
For my mini lesson, I will use passages on pages 14-17 of Bud Not Buddy. I chose a small passage in this book because this passage contains a lot of dialogue, which first graders should be able to recognize and read correctly, when read out loud. I think that most of the content is way too advanced for first graders, but with help, they should be able to sound out any words that they are unfamiliar with.
Objective: Students will be able to read pages 14-17 of the book, Bud Not Buddy, and will show understanding and correct reading of frequency words and prosody, by reading the passage out loud.
Procedures:
Connect: Remind students of quotation marks and their meaning. Practice reading quoted phrases out loud as a class, to model correct inflection in the voice. I will also remind students that they can tell how to read the sentence by looking at the punctuation that comes at the end of the sentence.
Teach: Read the passage of Bud Not Buddy out loud to the class. As I read, I will remind students that when they read out loud, they can use different pitches of their voice to model the different characters in the book. I will remind students of the punctuation cues, and model correct and incorrect ways of saying a sentence and have students decide which one is correct.
Active Engagement: Students will model correct prosody with a partner by reading chunks of texts out loud to each other. I will assign certain passages to different groups so that each group is working on a different part of the text. Students will talk in pairs for two or three minutes and then I will ask the class to share what they have read.
Link: Have students return to their seats and write a few sentences of their own that can be read with emotion. I will ask the students to write three sentences, one that ends with a period, one that ends with an exclamation point, and one that ends with a question mark.
During Conferences: I will walk around the room and look for students who are writing sentences with the correct punctuation.
Share: I will have students volunteer to share their sentences and read them out loud to the class. Students will be expected to read with correct prosody and show understanding of different inflections for the three sentence types.
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