15 fun and easy fluency practice activities to get your K-1 students reading at a just-right pace, with accuracy and expression!
Planning to tutor over the summer? Here are tips for quick and easy planning! Hi there! It's Sarah! I've been tutoring kiddos for the last year and have developed a routine that makes my planning easy and my session flow smoothly. All of the kiddos I tutor are grades K-2 and in need of a boost in their reading skills...fluency, comprehension, and phonics. Warm-up I like to start with some reading that is simple or familiar. I'll either have the kiddo re-read a text from the previous session or read fluency sentences. I have my kiddos keep a composition notebook with past passages to go back and re-read. I use lots of guided reader books to find the just right text for my kiddos to read. These are also great books to leave for kiddos to practice between sessions. Fluency sentence strips from The Moffatt Girls are a GREAT help to boost fluency and confidence! They are also super easy to leave for practice between sessions. Fluency Reading Practice My kiddos have all had good sight word recognition and really need fluency work. I switch between leveled readers and text passages. I usually have kiddos read the text themselves first. After reading, we go back through the text and find words that were tricky and read them. Next, I have the kiddo read through the text with me or by themselves if they are confident. Using a leveled reader Using fluency passages and recording words read per minute (the kiddos love to see their growth!) Find these fluency passages HERE! Using text evidence passages. Grab these passages HERE! Comprehension After some fluency practice with the selected text, I move into comprehension work. In our district, kiddos need to do a written response comprehension question as part of their reading assessment. I have my kiddos practice a written response question with every text and in every session. Comprehension with level reader I use these question stems to develop questions based on the text. Grab the question stems HERE! Completed written response, kiddos write in their composition journal Comprehension with text evidence passages. Grab these passages HERE! Here I use a reading passage with several comprehension tasks for a 2nd grade kiddo. Find these reading passage + comprehension packets HERE! Phonics After the reading and comprehension tasks are complete, I work on some phonics task with my kiddos. One of my favorite tasks is doing a word family word splash. I select a word from our text. I like how this tasks shows kiddos that if they can spell a work like bat, they can also spell cat, mat, sat, etc. Writing short sentences with words from the Word Family Splash Word building and sounding out Extras I like to use phonics poems as an additional fluency tool. The kiddos glue them into their composition notebook so they can go back and re-read between sessions, continuing to build fluency with familiar texts. These phonics poems are from Susan Jones. I use our Literacy Bags in between reading tasks. Literacy Bags break up the rigorous reading and fluency practice we do for much of the session. You can find Literacy Bags HERE! I'm working with a few Kindergartners who need sight word practice. I use the K version of our Differentiated Reading Fluency passages. In K, the passages start as reading letters, then sight words fluently. It perfect support for my K kiddos! You can grab these HERE! Additionally, our Print a Standard packs have been a great support for targeting specific skills students need to work on. Each pack contains tasks for one standard and has several activities for that standard, so there are a lot of opportunities to help the student learn, practice, and master standards based skills. You can grab Print a Standard packs for ELA AND MATH HERE! Connecting with students and parents on a more personal level is the best part of tutoring. I love giving kiddos instant feedback and celebrating their successes! I also love that I can give them more choices to foster a love of reading. In the picture above, I'm showing several text selections. The kiddos I'm working with is able to choose the book he'll read with me for the session. I also love being able to help parents foster learning at home. I've found most all of my parents did not really know about their kiddo's reading level or reading abilities. This makes it difficult for parents to find the best "just right" books for reading at home. After I work with a kiddo, I leave the text piece we worked on for that session (a passage or a book) so the kiddo can re-read it with parents. I leave their composition notebooks with phonics poems for the kiddos to go back a re-read. I also leave the fluency sentence strips for practice between sessions.
Reading with fluency is one of the hardest reading strategies to teach, but with these 11 interventions for reading fluency, you can give your struggling...
15 fun and easy fluency practice activities to get your K-1 students reading at a just-right pace, with accuracy and expression!
Grab these FREE fluency passages for your kindergarten and first grade students. They are printable and low-prep! Students will love practicing decoding, comprehension, and fluency skills with these fun and engaging passages. Get 10 activities in this free download! Grab them now
Are you needing a new and engaging way to provide opportunities for your students to develop reading fluency? If you are, you will love this activity using technology! Why is Reading Fluency Important? Reading fluency is an important building block in the development of a strong reader. Research shows that the more a passage is […]
In today's post, I'll share ideas for teaching inferring through a gradual release of responsibility. Make sure to read all the way through the post, because there are several different freebies you can download and use right away!
HOW do I start first grade fluency ? This is a really important question! As a matter of fact I am headed to Vegas to speak on fluency at the SDE iTeach1st Conference! That's how important fluency is to me and how much it benefits my students in the literacy growth. Other super key questions are WHEN should I start fluency and WHAT materials should I use? I am nobody’s boss, but let me share what I do. FALL FLUENCY & SIGHT WORDS In the fall we work really hard on sight word fluency. I want them to master 300 words by the end of the year. They are divided into groups of 10 (30 lists) and placed into daily homework folders. The sight words are very prominent in the set up. They are half sheets and become very well worn by the end of the school year! The fluency passage is right there next to the sight words, so that both can be read easily! We practice them daily in class, during afternoon reading buddies, and for homework. We really hit them hard and play a lot of sight word games I found on Pinterest. After speaking at a kinder conference in the spring, it occurred to me that I should be doing single-passage fluency in the fall. But how would I start? What would it look like? This might be how you are feeling too. FALL FLUENCY & PASSAGES: I hit the books, “Googled” it, talked to others and, honestly, I prayed. How and when would I introduce single-sheet passages to my firsties? Shouldn’t they be turning the pages of little books in the fall? Are their “reading eyes” too new for passages? First graders are fragile and if you overwhelm them, they FREAK out. Oh my goodness could I really consider timing these babies on words per minute? Prayer, Google, Diebles, and Fran Kramer, Prayer, Google, Diebles, Fran Kramer REPEAT. This was how I spent my summer and I came up with a plan. Research told me first graders should not be timed until December or January. Shared reading is how I decided to start with a soft launch into passages. This is my pocket chart. I know this looks like teaching from 1992, but this works. I wrote out the single sheet fluency passage onto sentence strips and created comprehension picture cards that go with the fluency. I also wrote the fluency to have very readable and predictable text! In this way (Pocket chart style) I begin to model fluency, 1 to 1 correlation, and vocal intonation, rate, and accuracy. Then the kids take over the pointer and the real magic happens. I mean look at those babies! Hands in the air BEGGING to read. Be still my heart! We pull picture cards off and put them back on to encourage comprehension. I hand out the cards and when you hear the line read that matches your card you get to come up and put it on the chart. The kids LOVE getting up and reading off the “Big Chart”. We do a lot of echo reading at this point too! FALL FLUENCY & SIMPLIFIED PASSAGES: Keeping it readable is key. I really think my job in this first trimester is to help the children see themselves as readers! Many of their skills are lying just under the surface and with a little practice, luck, and love those skills will come bursting through as will a confident and excited reader. So I wrote really easy, but engaging passages. They should be easily mastered within a few days so the kids can begin to build their fluent voices! Passages come with and without numbers so that children can be timed or not. FALL FLUENCY & ART: You know that I believe art is important. There is no denying I am into making learning fun. Each passage has a darling art project and bulletin board lettering for you to display. Does a pretty room equal smart kids? No. Does an engaged child equal a smart child? More often than not. I display the art we will create next to the fluency passage on my chart to get them excited and pumped up about the passage we are reading. FLUENCY and WRITING These go hand in hand!!! I LOVE having my students write about our fluency topic. The ideas are ones they are SO familiar with! By Friday, when we sit down to write, the ideas flow easily and they can concentrate a little more on conventions. Please, God, let them capitalize, punctuate, and use finger spaces. PLEASE! I adore “processes of learning” maps, Thinking maps, or smart charts. Whatever you call them, they help the kids organize their thinking and I like that! Kids at this age level need that all year, not just in the fall! These are our Circle Maps for the healthy foods we like to eat! FLUENCY MATERIALS- Informational Text In my opinion the content read by kids in a fluency manner should be Social Studies and Science based! Kids are hungry to read about the real world. This is also a simple way to get informational reading into my day! If they are going to read a passage no less than 20 times, shouldn’t it be worth while? Shouldn’t it add to their schema? I think it should. Any of the images below are clickable. If you want to try some of the Fall units you can buy a few separately to get a taste of the goodness! Plus, of course you get the comprehension pictures to go along with a pocket chart ! Pocket Chart: Obviously pocket chart, holder, or sentence strips are not included. I am pretty sure I don’t have to say that, but you never know…. Bulletin Board Lettering and Art Masters: Great blog post on how to start teaching fluency at the start of first grade Bonus Free Resource Links and Pocket Chart Pictures: Bulletin Board Lettering and Art Masters: Pocket Chart Pictures: Bulletin Board Lettering and Art Masters: Not pictured since the kids do the art on Tuesday! I promise to update this post for sure when they complete the art! FALL FLUENCY LESSON PLANS & TEACHER HELPERS Each packet comes with easy to read lesson plans and explanations for how I run my successful program. It’s a very common sense approach. 20 minutes of your school day will turn into the most powerful minutes of your day for building comprehension and fluency! If you are hungry for more games, strategies, and materials I wrote a 101 post {here}. Let’s get these little babies reading. Let’s have some fun together in the midst of Common Core drama. Let’s just teach reading to the best of our ability with Social Studies and Science passages that matter in real life! Check out the newsletter {here} where I got to share a little fluency tip! Comprehension and Fluency I really love fluency and just cannot help but share that passion! If you have any questions, inspirations, or ah-ha moments I'd LOVE to hear them! You can always email me or leave a comment! [email protected] See Ya'll in Vegas. XOXO!!!!
Making an inference is such an important skill for reading comprehension! Ideas, lessons, anchor charts, & activities for inferring that work with any text!
Hi everyone, My little learners have been working SO hard on their reading these past few months and I am VERY excited to show what what they have been up to!
Inside you will find: * 6 Read and Color pages. * 4 Read and Draw These comprehension activities are ideal for students in kindergarten and first grade. Use this as a listening comprehension activities for your kindergarten students, or have your first graders read the passages and work independently. These are perfect for literacy centers, independent work, morning work, fast finisher, homework and more. Check out the full packet here: Reading Comprehension Activities (THE BUNDLE) This set goes well with my: Reading Comprehension Check (The Bundle) Check out the freebies here: FREE Reading Comprehension Check You may also be interested in: Reading Comprehension THE BUNDLE Reading Fluency and Comprehension THE BUNDLE If you have any questions, please email me at: [email protected] before purchasing *************************************************** Follow my stores for more AWESOME FREEBIES and GET UPDATES on my NEW PRODUCTS!! Connect with me: Teaching Biilfizzcend Instagram Teaching Biilfizzcend Pinterest
Plus, three free scripts to try on your own.
These free phonics reading passages have it all: phonics skills, fluency practice and comprehension questions. Plus, students love them!
Get ideas for teaching the six syllable types to your students, details about my Syllable Types Resource and a FREE syllable types activity to get you started!
My school focus is Literacy Work Stations. We have rolled out the independent reading station, writing station and fluency station. Each week I have visited classrooms to document and give kudos to…
Word reading fluency (decoding) is so important in learning to read with phonics. These phonics drills are printable worksheets that provide students the opportunity to apply newly learned phonics skills in the context of words. These 1 Page Wonders provide everything you need for no prep, scaffolded, decoding practice that will lead to FLUENCY! BUNDLE CONTENTS 1 Page Wonders - Short Vowel Edition 1 Page Wonders - Digraphs Edition 1 Page Wonders - Blends Edition 1 Page Wonders - Long Vowels Edition - (CVCe & Long Vowel Teams) 1 Page Wonders - R-Controlled Vowels Edition 1 Page Wonders - Diphthongs Edition All about the 1 Page Wonders for Word Reading Fluency Phonics Drills Target phonics skill is easy to locate so you can quickly find just what you need for each lesson Stars indicates level of difficulty, so differentiation is easy Warm-up frontloads students with skills they will find in the fluency table for ultimate decoding success Fluency table with decodable words only Three smiley faces encourage students to reread the table and build optimum word fluency Three Levels Stars on each page indicate the level of difficulty. Easily scaffold & differentiate every skill/ Star Levels vary by skill type. 1 star 2 stars 3 stars [when applicable] Each Vowel Sound has Two Sets real words set 1 page for each applicable level nonsense words set 1 page for each applicable level This is repeated for every set/skill included in each packet! *Please read the list below and know I am unable to make custom changes for you at this time!* Short Vowels Included a, e, i, o, u Digraphs Included beginning digraphs: sh, th, wh, ch ending digraphs: ch, ck, sh, th mixed review: beginning and ending digraphs above +ph advanced di/trigraphs: tch, wr, kn, dge, gn Blends Included beginning blends s blends (st, sl, sk, sm, sn, sc, sw, spl, spr, str, scr) l blends (fl, cl, pl, bl, gl) r blends (br, cr, dr, gr, fr, pr, tr) mixed review: all beginning blends shown above ending blends l blends (lf, ld, lp, lm, lb, lc, lk, lt) mixed blends (nt, ng, nd, nk, mp, ct, ft, pt, st, sk, sp) mixed review: all ending blends (all ending blends shown above) CVCe Skills Included Long a Long i Long o Long u Vowel Team Skills Included Long A Vowel Teams: • ai • ay Long E Vowel Teams • ea • ee • ie Long I Vowel Teams • igh • y • ie Long O Vowel Teams • oa • ow • oe Long U Vowel Teams • ew • oo • ue Mixed Long Vowel Teams 1 • long a, long e, long o Mixed Long Vowel Teams 2 • long i, long u Diphthongs Included aw ew oi ow au oo (tooth) oy ou R-Controlled Vowels Included ar er ir or ur Ways to Use Single student use: Copy the pages and give one to each student. These are great to use whole group, in reading groups, tutoring, homework, and more! Multi student use: Print on cardstock and/or laminate. Place on rings according to vowel sound. Use (again and again) in reading groups, tutoring, and more! ⚠️ Please feel free to ask any/all questions prior to purchasing! ⚠️ 1 ► Leave me a ❓“question” in my TpT store OR 2 ► Email me [email protected] ⭐️✨ I post all NEW resources for 50% OFF for a limited time only! ✨⭐️ ► Click HERE to follow my store and be notified when new resources are posted. ❤️ Get freebies, tips, and new resources delivered weekly to your inbox! ❤️ ► Click HERE to join The Teachable Teachers!
Do your young learners have poetry journals?! Mine do and we love them. The main question I have been asked in the past is what I put inside my journals and I created a resource to help answer that question. Most of the poems in our poetry journals are phonics poems, but I also […]
I am pretty excited to share with you something I have been working on all summer! As a first grade teacher, I have had parents tell me t...
Things are heating up outside as we enter the end of the school year. You can grab this FREE summer activity to end things off with your students!
Do your young learners have poetry journals?! Mine do and we love them. The main question I have been asked in the past is what I put inside my journals and I created a resource to help answer that question. Most of the poems in our poetry journals are phonics poems, but I also […]
This reading passage with comprehension questions is FREE! Included are pre-reading activities and follow up reading and and writing activities too. Students are practicing fluency, comprehension, writing, vocabulary, sight words, illustrating and MORE! This is a FREE preview of my complete READ AND COMPREHEND unit. Included in the complete unit are 10 reading passages with coordinating activities. I like to use one topic per week. To learn more, please CLICK HERE I hope you love this resource as much as we do! Happy teaching :)
Most likely, you've ran across some variation of the two buckets puzzle at some time in your life. You have two buckets. One bucket holds exactly five
Structured Literacy is an instructional approach to teaching students to read that encompasses all of the elements of language and...
Reading fluency begins with automaticity with sounds and words. If you are a primary grade teacher, use these tips to set the foundation for fluent reading.
Need to help your students get more hands on practice for their vocabulary words? I've got 5 fun vocabulary games you can use right away!
Decoding drills for building fluency helps students apply phonics skills when reading. Perfect warm ups and a great tracking tool, too.
Hi everyone, My little learners have been working SO hard on their reading these past few months and I am VERY excited to show what what they have been up to!
Phonics fluency notebooks are one of my favorite literacy activities for teaching students to read with fluency and comprehension. I...
Total Pages: 720 "Practically 1st Grade" Passages Preview 1st Grade Passages Preview 2nd Grade Passages Preview 3rd Grade Passages Preview
For second-grade students looking to strengthen their understanding of main idea, worksheets can be a valuable tool. Designed to enhance comprehension skills, these worksheets provide targeted practice in identifying the central theme or topic of a passage or text. With engaging exercises and clear instructions, these worksheets offer a structured approach to help young learners grasp the concept of main idea and develop their reading and critical thinking abilities.
The pressure is on! I have my formal principal's evaluation on Tuesday. I don't know about you but these always make me soooooo nervous. I've done them a million times. I've had tons of people, over the years, in my classroom watching me teach from district personnel to other school's principals but it always makes me crazy. I think it's because I'm a perfectionist. I want the perfect lesson and my students to behave in a perfect way. Well it ain't gonna happen this time. I have a VERY difficult class! Plus I have a new principal and I'm not sure how he grades. And I'm going to use my new Smartboard which doesn't always work the way I want it to. I think that's what is making me soooo nervous. But the 'SHOW' must go on and I'll just do my best. This darling frame is a freebie by 'Sweet Berry Patch' over on her Teacher Notebook shop. She has some cute stuff! I'm introducing contractions. I'm excited about my lesson. I'm going to have the kiddos build contractions with tiles and find them in their reading. I love teaching by the gradual release method so there will be lots of TO, WITH, and BY. I LOVE this song and wish I knew who wrote it so I could give credit. If you'd like to download the anchor chart, practice sheets, and song click HERE. Linking up with Rebecca's FREEBIE Linking Party. Go check it out. There are some GREAT FREEBIES! I hope everyone has a great LONG weekend! Thanks for stopping by.
Teachers throw the word “fluency” into parent conferences, but what does it mean, and why is it important? Fluency leads to increased comprehension. And increased comprehension matters, because in grade 3, the shift goes from learning to read to... #automaticity #buildingfluency #dailyreading
Help your elementary students master their addtion and subtraction facts by teaching the Derived Fact Strategies. Aslo known as called 'thinking strategies'
My students have been learning about patterns this past week! We talked about patterns around the room, patterns on the 120 chart, labeling patterns, and pattern units. It was A LOT of pattern talk. I actually had never taught an explicit pattern lesson until this year, but these little ones needed it! After we did […]
