Fluency Techniques
Each day, fluent reading is being practiced. Here are some fluency techniques to help your students read with prosody and for meaning during your shared reading time.
Echo Reading
Echo reading is "I read you, then you repeat read". This is an easy reading confidence builder.
Choral Reading
Choral reading is reading aloud together.
Touch Reading-This strategy is only for emergent readers. After level D, students should read with their eyes, not their fingers.
Have students touch the words on the chart paper as they choral read or echo read.
If students need word solving skills, the Guess the Covered Word technique helps students think through figuring out unknown words quickly.
Students use context clues and schema to figure out the word. Start by covering several words in the text. With your students, read up to the unknown word. Say "hum, I don't know this word. What would make sense?" Students should make predictions based on the meaning of the sentence or paragraph. Read past the unknown word to confirm meaningful predictions. Have students use the clues around the word to figure out what the word might be. Ask students to suggest words that would be appropriate and plug them in to see if they make sense.
Uncover the beginning sound or sounds of the word. Do the predictions match the letter sounds? Uncover the entire syllable or chunks of the word as you model efficient blending of the word. Discuss why the original predictions worked or didn't work. Good readers are always using meaning, syntax (grammar), and visual cues (letter patterns) to figure out unknown words.