Reading fluency is key to your child’s success as a reader. Read to find some specific ways to support your child’s fluency at home. 

Fluency is vital to reading comprehension because our brains can only attend to a limited number of things at a time. If most of our attention is focused on decoding (figuring out) the words, there is little attention left for comprehension (Cunningham & Allington, 2011).

In order for your child to become an avid and enthusiastic reader who gets enjoyment and information from reading, they must develop fluency.

Oral Reading Builds Confidence and Fluency

4 Ways to Build Reading Fluency

1. Model Good Oral Reading

When you read aloud to your child, you model fluent reading. When you draw attention to how you’re reading, you help your child see that meaning in reading is carried not only in the words, but also in the way the words are expressed. One way you can do this is by reading a page or several pages twice – one time with fluency and the other time in a labored/word-by-word reading. Ask your child which one sounded better and why. It is much easier for your child to recognize the positives and negatives of your two examples than to recognize it in their own reading. It also provides a safe example for your child to talk about the aspects of fluency without feeling like they did something wrong. This conversation is an important and valuable lesson on how you want your child to sound as they are reading.

Often times there is such a focus on reading accurately, that  children get so focus on reading the words correctly and they forget about how it sounds and making meaning from the words they are reading.

Good oral reading includes the following:

from Guided Reading by Fountas and Pinnell (2017)

Accuracy – reading the words correctly.

Pausing- using punctuation to guide the voice (taking a breath at a period)

Phrasing – putting words together in meaningful groups as they read.

Stress – placing emphasis on particular words in a sentence to reflect meaning and structure.

Intonation – varying the tone of the voice to show the meaning of the text.

Rate – moving through the text at an appropriate rate. Your child may read rapidly to gather information or to show action in a fiction text. Your child may slow down for emphasis.

Integration – orchestrating their reading, using pausing, phrasing, stress, intonation ,and rate in a smoothly integrated way.

2. Provide Support for Readers

Another way to develop fluency is offering simultaneous support while your child reads. Your child’s reading fluency and comprehension can improve when they have the opportunity to simultaneously read and hear a fluent rendition of a text (Topping 1987, 1995). You could offer this support by chorally reading a text or by using books on CD or audiobooks.

For younger children, reading the words to patterned texts such as I Went Walking and Cookie’s Week are enjoyable and increases your child’s confidence with reading. Brown Bear, Brown Bear and The Very Hungry Caterpillar are some other great options.

One of my daughter’s favorite gifts she received last Christmas was a small CD player and books on CD. She loves listening and reading along to some of her favorite stories. We continue to add to her books on CD collection and we have had great success finding many sets through Scholastic book orders. This is a great way for her to practice reading books that are well above her current reading level. By reading texts like this she practices reading more advanced vocabulary, longer sentences, more text on a page, and much more.

Songs are also great for this. You can find sing alongs with the words that will help your child. When we were recently at Hollywood Studios in Orlando, we attended the Disney Frozen Sing Along. As a part of the show, they display some of the songs from the movie. As the songs are played, the words are displayed on the bottom of the screen with a bouncing snowflake to show you which word you are supposed to sing. I was reminded of how great sing alongs are for building children’s fluency especially with familiar songs. The practice of seeing the words they know as they sing them can help them become more familiar with many words and ultimately, increasing the amount of words they can quickly read. Here’s an example of a Frozen Sing-along.

3. Offer Plenty of Practice Opportunities

As with most things, practice is critical for your child’s reading fluency. When your child is first learning to read, most of their attention will be focused on decoding the words. Overtime, with practice, your child will read more fluently and can direct their attention toward making sense of what they are reading. Encourage your child to reread favorite books or short passages to practice their fluency. You can also encourage them to do this orally to prevent them from skimming and scanning the text.

4. Encourage Fluency Through Phrasing

Fluent readers are readers who decode automatically and chunk words into phrases (Rasinski, 1990).

Tim Rasinski (2003) offers the following example:

The young man the jungle gym.

“On the first reading, the sentence may not make sense. And decoding, or understanding the meaning of any individual word, is most likely not what’s causing difficulty. Your difficulty lies in phrasing. Most readers chunk the first portion of the sentence, ‘The young man…,’ into a phrase. But by doing that, he or she is left without a verb. Good readers generally go back and ‘rechunk’ the text in a different manner, perhaps this way:

The young/man the jungle gym. (i.e., ‘young’ as a noun meaning a group of young people and ‘man’ as a verb meaning occupy.” (Rasinski, 2003, p. 32)

Encourage your child to read in phrases. If the phrase doesn’t make sense, urge your child to reread and try to break the sentence in a different way. Let your child know that sometimes they might need to try this several times for it to make sense.Fluent readers are able to read the words accurately and chunk a text in ways that makes sense.

One part of fluency is the rate your child is reading. Here are some guidelines from Tim Rasinski (2003) showing how many words your child should be able to read per minute.

Grade Level                   Target Number of Correct Words per Minute

1^stgrade (2^ndhalf of year)                        60

2^ndgrade                                                         90

3^rdgrade                                                         100

4^thgrade                                                         110

5^thgrade                                                         120

6^thgrade and higher                                  140

Repeatedly reading a few phrases per week gives your child the practice they need to learn high-frequency words, but also gives your child practice in reading phrases, which is key to developing fluency and general proficiency.

Simply provide your child with 5-10 phrases on a piece of paper or dry erase board and practice reading the phrases with them.

References:

Cunningham, P. M., & Allington, R. L. (2011). Classrooms that work: They can all read and write. Boston, MA: Pearson.

Fountas, I. C., & Pinnell, G. S. (2017). Guided reading: Responsive teaching across the grades. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Rasinski, T. V. (2003). The fluent reader: Oral reading strategies for building word recognition, fluency, and comprehension. Scholastic Inc..

Topping, K. (1987). Paired reading: A powerful technique for parent use. The Reading Teacher, 40, 604-614. 

Hope this information gives you some tools to help your child become a more fluent reader.

Please let us know how you support fluency at your house.