Let’s eat, Grandma! vs. Let’s eat Grandma. We all know the old adage. Fluency, a practice which includes how efficiently, how accurately, how emotionally, and how attentively we read, is important; in fact – it can save lives…including Grandma’s! 🙂

When our children read robotically, without expression or intention, their comprehension and their engagement can suffer. In this article, studies have found that oral fluency has almost a 1:1 correlation with a child’s reading comprehension.

So, how can we build it – and more importantly, how can we do it without our children knowing that it’s hard work? According to Reading Rockets, a few activities that you can try at home to support reading fluency instruction are the following:

• Student/Adult Reading – find a book that interests your child at the library. If you aren’t sure how to do that, check out our post from Wednesday, September 21st. Then, take turns reading the novel with your child, modeling for them what fluent reading sounds like.
  • Be sure to emphasize the emotions in the text, the pauses within each clause, and the flow, which comes with all strong readers. Then, let them try.
  • It could also be neat to try reading in different voices – i.e. an old man, a professor, a young child, etc. to explore with various characters and inflections.
• Reader’s Theater – students love this activity. Find a short play – or have your child make it up one Saturday morning. Then give each person in your family a part. That person must embody their character’s voice and personality in all of their lines, reading fluently along the way.
• Audiobooks – try having students listen to audiobooks. This will help to model that fluent reading and also help with recognizing new vocabulary words.

This anchor chart from We Are Teachers is a great checklist to help your child reach their fullest potential as an expert reader:

To see some of these strategies in action, sign your child up for our reading labs on November 1st and 2nd via this link: https://tinyurl.com/3n7j4few

Looking forward to seeing them there!