Fluency Activities that are FUN

Fluency can be so difficult to teach.  It seems that teachers today are overwhelmed with the ever-popular WPM (words per minute) data.  However, WPM are only a small slice of the fluency pie.  Reading with fluency is so much more than just counting the number of words our students can read per minute.  They even start to believe that "good reading" means to read as many words as they can in a minute.  Why wouldn't they with all of the WPM assessments that we give them with a short passage and a minute timer?  Yes, there is some merit to WPM, but it's not the "end all, be all" to improving students fluency.

There are so many more pieces of the fluency pie: expression, phrasing, accuracy, reading punctuation, and more.  In my opinion, when students learn to incorporate all of these elements into their reading, their fluency AND comprehension improve at amazing rates.  After all, isn't the ultimate goal for students to be able to comprehend and respond to their reading? 

The BIG question is- "How do I teach fluency and make it engaging and fun for students?"  It's really a million dollar question.  Below I have included a few activities that I have found to be successful with my students (some my own ideas, and some that I have gotten from some wonderful colleagues).  Please feel free to comment to this post and add more.  I am always looking for more ways to incorporate fluency into the content areas as well as the literacy block. 

For Expression: 

• Find a reader's theater script that will work for you.  Read through line by line in a very monotone voice.  Then, ask students to read it aloud to make it sound more natural.  Ask students to listen to specific words that they read with a higher, lower, louder, or quieter pitch.  They should highlight those words to remind them to read them that way as they reread the text.  This is a great activity for discussion about intonation because some students will read things different ways, and that's OK.  I never make all students highlight everything the same. 
• Find lyrics to some of your students favorite songs, and have them do the same activity as above with the lyrics.  It may help to have students listen to the song to see how the artist changes his or her expression.

For Phrasing:

• Use song lyrics again, but this time students make slash marks to separate each phrase.  Practice putting slash marks in different places to see what sounds natural.  Again, it would be helpful for students to listen to lyrics and to write slash marks as they listen.
• Here's an activity that you probably already know about.  Just in case not, I'm including it.  Use Microsoft PowerPoint to have students read a collection of High-Frequency Phrases that are repeated often (and in other variations) in reading.  There are tons already created and accessible for free online.  (A big thanks to all of those teachers who have shared these wonderful resources.)  Some are preset with timing options that change pages on their own.  Some are set for the teacher to control the speed of the changing slides.  Some links are below.

        Phrases that allow you to control clicking speed  

        Tons of Phrases with Preset Timings


For Reading Punctuation:

• Copy any reader's theater or other piece of text that you want to use and "white out" all of the punctuation.  In place of punctuation write in an underscore symbol (_) where the punctuation should be.  Make copies for each student, and go through together and have discussions about what type of punctuation should go in that space.  Practice reading the text with different options to see what sounds correct.  This will get students to pay more attention to what different punctuation marks mean and how to read them.
• You or your kiddos write silly phrases on paper (or white boards).  Change punctuation (and even the way words look-  bold, all caps, etc.) several times with the same phrases and have students practice reading the punctuation.  It's hard to do, but it gets them thinking.
• Use the high-frequency phrases (mentioned above) and add punctuation to the phrases.  Students can no practice phrasing and reading punctuation together!

I hope you found some useful ideas.  I'd love to hear about your endeavors.

Elissa