I was not a good reader at school; I read the Redwall series by Brian Jacques at an embarrassingly late age and, more mortifyingly, after my brother … who is 4 years younger than me. The shame.
However, it may just be that I wasn’t taught reading fluency strategically enough in the classroom or at home. So, to save boys and girls out there the humiliation of having their younger sibling read Tolstoy whilst they read about mice fighting rats in a medieval monastery for rodents, here are some tips from Clarendon:
There are 3 components to reading fluently:
- Accuracy – reading an appropriate passage with few or no errors or omissions.
- Automacity – reading on sight without hesitation
- Prosody – adding expression and intonation.
And here are 5 strategies to improve these components, either in class, in tutorials or accompanied reading with mum and dad:
- Echo reading. Read a sentence (to begin with) and a paragraph (more developed) ahead of your child, so that they can copy your intonation and rhythm, building confidence.
- Repeated reading. This is especially effective on passages that they have struggled on previously. Have them return to a passage (and this could be just a sentence; you don’t want to hold them up too much), and work on the accuracy and automacity, if these were lacking.
- Performance reading. Review the text beforehand, discussing which parts might be read in which way, before performing out loud, preferably to a new audience (a sibling, a nanny or a different parent).
- Text marking. Break a text down into clauses, phrases or units of meaning. Annotate, the emotion or intention behind each section. This helps with comprehension, as well as prosody.
- Modelled reading. Read aloud as much as you can to your children and have them follow, they will then model their prosody and their reading rhythm off you.
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We know most of you will already be doing these things with your child, but we hope this was helpful in breaking down why we follow each strategy.
