Internet Fluency Resources — Get Your Printers Ready
- Grades: 1–2, 3–5
As a proponent of academic intervention, our district mandates that we teachers monitor fluency in students grades 2–6 on
Internet Fluency Resources — Get Your Printers Ready
- Grades: 1–2, 3–5
As a proponent of academic intervention, our district mandates that we teachers monitor fluency in students grades 2–6 on a weekly basis. Weekly fluency monitoring equals ample fluency practice throughout the week. It also means I spend plenty of time each week scouring the Internet and books for fluency resources. In this post, I am going to share some of these resources with you. Get your printers ready — they may be working overtime today.
Why Worry About Fluency?
The last time I wrote a post on fluency was in 2008, and rereading it — or "rethinking" it — recently, I realized how many resources are now available that weren’t readily available then. This post is dedicated purely to printable resources found on the Web. But first, why worry about fluency? Here's what the experts have to say on the subject:
- According to Timothy V. Rasinski in his article, “Speed Does Matter in Reading,” excessively slow reading leads to less overall reading, poor comprehension, and reading frustration. Students need to be reading appropriate texts in order to practice increasing reading speed. Texts should be well within the student’s independent-instructional range.
- “Fifteen percent of all 4th graders read no faster than 74 words per minute, a pace at which it would be difficult to keep track of ideas as they are developing within the sentence and across the page. ~ Guided Reading: Good First Teaching for All Children, Fountas and Pinnell
- Repeated and monitored oral reading had a significant positive impact on word recognition, fluency, and comprehension. ~ National Reading Panel report
- According to Richard Allington, we need to worry about the "cycle of defeat." Nonfluent readers most often struggle because of a lack of practice with reading. In order to increase fluency, start students at their independent reading level to get over that first hurdle of learning to decode words.
Fluency Resources Galore
Okay, here we go. Get ready....
Advice From Former Top Teaching Blogger Danielle Mahoney
It baffles me that so few people commented on Danielle’s incredible fluency posts:
She was my go-to source at the beginning of the year for fluency instruction, and I have used every single anchor chart, bookmark, and printable resource in these two posts. If you have the time, I highly suggest you take a look. Below are some of her incredible fluency resources.
Danielle’s Anchor Charts
“What?” you say. “I can’t print an anchor chart!” Why, yes, you can. In fact, you can print out any JPEG image on this site, as small or as large as you’d like, using Blockposters and your printer.
My students LOVED the task of "swooping" (phrasing)