A student's reading rate is his or her oral reading speed. We assess each student's rate several times a year in two different ways.
First, we record each student's speed while reading a book out loud at his or her instructional level. This may be above, below, or at the fourth grade reading level. We share this information at Parent/Teacher Conferences.
Second, we assess each student's reading rate every quarter using a fourth-grade-level text. This assessment goes on the report card.
The best way to improve a child's reading rate, of course, is to practice reading out loud. Rate also can go up dramatically when a child reads the same text over again several times. We practice oral reading in class with frequent choral reading (everybody reading together) and with poems (such as the ones on the homework packets).
The reason we assess oral reading rate is to help us gauge how well students can read silently. The problems that pop up when students read out loud tend to be the same problems that students have when they read to themselves:
Many children read slowly because they need extra time to figure out challenging words. Students must have good decoding skills. The most important decoding strategy when tackling fourth grade texts is breaking a word into its different parts. For example, a student looking at the word "earthquake" should immediately notice two words, "earth" and "quake." This decoding strategy is far faster than sounding the word out letter by letter. In another example, students' eyes should automatically break apart the word "unwrapped" into its three parts: the base word "wrap," the prefix "un" and the suffix "ed." When students train their eyes and brains to look at words this way, they will improve their decoding speed. And of course, the more they do it, the easier it will be!
Students may also have trouble breaking a sentence into its parts. Sentences have natural breaks; after all, they reflect the way we talk! Punctuation, especially commas, is one guide to help chunk a sentence into phrases. Students need to read sentences as collections of phrases, and they need to read phrases as a unit. For example, the following sentence has three phrases: "Samantha knew, deep in her heart, that it was time." Students should read the first two words together without taking a breath. They should breathe or pause at the comma, and then they should read the next phrase with a single push of air. Then another breath or short pause, and then they read the final phrase with one last push of air. Like breaking up words, breaking up sentences involves training students' eyes and brains to see sentences differently.
We practice word-chunking and sentence-phrasing in class every day, particularly in Sitton Spelling and Just Words classes. When you listen to your child reading out loud at home, and you hear your child stumble over a word or a sentence, encourage your child to see the parts of words and sentences that you see.