Fluency

What is Fluency?

Fluency encomposses the concepts of reading accuracy, reading rate and reading with expression (prosody). Over the course of our K-2 Reading curriculum, students are taught specific skills and strategies to read fluently, such as rereading a sentence after decoding a tricky word and thinking about a character's feelings when reading dialogue to read with appropriate expression. Fluency is related to reading automaticity. The more proficient students become at decoding tricky words, the more "brain space" is available to read fluently and with automaticity. Students are taught to read sentences in meaningful phrases (grouping by semantic and syntactic features) (Hook & Jones, 2002). Students practice scooping sentences into meaningful phrases for reading such as "Who/What?", "Did What?", "Where?", "When?", "How?" Ultimately, this aids a students' comprehension because they are able to focus less on decoding and more about the meaning of the text.

An example of scooping text into meaningful phrases

Fun with Fluency at Home!

Try these activities to practice fluency with your child at home. Research shows that repeated readings (reading stories over and over!) is one of the best ways to support your child's reading fluency.