Reading fluency activities that actually work, from a reading intervention teacher – including a favorite fluency routine, readers theatre.
I have spent many years as a reading intervention teacher, working mostly with first and second graders who needed extra support. My students had all kinds of needs: phonics, self-monitoring, breaking apart longer words, making inferences. And fluency.
I’ll be honest: the kids who struggled with fluency were sometimes the hardest for me to work with. Their reading was SO. BORING. They read everything WORD. BY. WORD. If I met with them right after lunch, I had to fight to stay awake. No wonder these kids hated reading! It showed in every word.
So my job was to break that habit. This post shares some of my most effective strategies for turning slow, labored reading into smooth(er), more fluent reading – including one of my favorite activities of all time: readers theatre.
Dysfluent reading doesn’t just sound rough to listen to. It impacts comprehension too. Kids who are stuck word-by-word have less mental energy left to focus on meaning. That’s why it’s worth building fluency even with early readers, from late kindergarten and up.
What Does Fluency in Reading Mean?
People often think of fluency as fast reading, but there is so much more to fluent reading than reading rate. A fast reader can still use a monotone voice and read without phrases. Instead of only words per minute, I like to view fluency as the use of:
- phrasing
- punctuation (pausing)
- expression
- rate
It’s important to encourage even early readers to pay attention to these aspects of fluency, particularly as they reread familiar text. As your readers become more fluent, you will love listening to them read with expression and sound so grown-up in their reading!
These reading fluency activities will have your students sounding like pros in no time:
Build Fluency with Phrased Reading
Encourage phrased reading with the following reading fluency activities:
Use lines of text to support phrasing
Books for very early readers typically include one phrase per line of text (ex: The cat ran up the hill. or The big duck can see a green tree.) As kids read, prompt word-by-word readers to read the whole line together or to read “these words” smoothly (showing them one complete line of text).
Prompts: Read the whole line together. – Read these words together (while teacher frames a line of text with fingers.)
Make fluent reading sound like talking
Sometimes you might model with speech what it sounds like when your students read WORD. BY. WORD. (You might say, “Today. is. a. sunny. day. – 5-6 words is probably all the more you can handle!) Then ask them if they talk like that (with pauses between each word). After they repeat the sentence back to you like they would say it when talking, prompt them to make their reading sound like that – like talking.
Prompt: Make it sound like talking.
Model phrasing and expression
As teachers, we model phrasing and expression in our read-aloud time. But you can also model it during your small group instruction, as needed. Some kids need to hear what simple books sound like when read fluently. Prompt them to listen to how you read one page. Then ask them to reread that page (or read the next one), making it sound like your reading. For some kids you might prompt more specifically, asking them to notice how you put your words together, or made it sound interesting (expression) or made it sound like a question.
Prompts: Make your reading sound smooth, like I did. – Make this sound like an exciting story!
Choose texts carefully
When teaching specifically for fluency, it’s important to take a few things into consideration when you choose books for students to read:
Choose texts with dialogue
Beginning readers are more likely to use phrasing and expression when a character is talking. Dialogue naturally breaks into short, conversational chunks, which makes it easier for kids to read with the same phrasing and tone they’d use if they were talking themselves. Look for books where characters actually talk to each other, not just narration.
Try Readers Theatre
This is one of my favorite fluency routines, and it’s built almost entirely around dialogue. Each child reads one character’s lines, over and over, across several run-throughs of the same script.
Reading the same lines multiple times (sometimes called repeated reading) is one of the most effective ways to build fluency. Each time through, word-solving gets less labored and reading gets more automatic. Readers theatre gives kids a built-in reason to reread the same script several times, without it feeling like drill-and-kill, since they’re rehearsing for a “performance,” not just rereading for practice.
The Little Red Hen works especially well for this. Three of the four animal characters repeat the same line over and over: “Not I!” So even your most word-by-word readers get a part they can read smoothly within the first run-through. But the script isn’t only repetition. The Hen’s lines change each time she asks for help, and the ending flips the pattern entirely. Kids get the confidence of a repeated line and the payoff of a script that actually goes somewhere.
Ready to try it? Grab The Little Red Hen readers theatre script here and use it with your group this week.
Choose texts with repeated phrases
Short ‘refrains,’ or repeated phrases that show up again and again in a story, encourage fluency because they quickly become familiar, letting a child focus less on word-solving and more on fluency. Readers Theatre scripts are a great source of this kind of repeated-line text too, it’s part of why they work so well for fluency practice. Other repetitive texts might include a repeated sentence at the end of each page.
Consider choosing easier books
Sometimes simply decreasing the word-solving load increases fluency. You might particularly consider this if you are unable to find books with lots of meaningful dialogue or with repeated phrases or the stage your students are at. These easier texts would be great to incorporate into partner reading or even to add to a soft start to your school day.
Think about high frequency words.
Sometimes fluency is impacted because a child is working hard to solve too many words in a text – they don’t know these common words by sight. When you notice this happen, it’s important to spend time increasing the child’s reading vocabulary. You can find suggestions to do this in this post.
If you know that a child is getting tripped up on 1-2 specific high frequency words that appear in the text, you might focus on those words a bit before reading. Try some of the following:
- Spend time orthographically mapping the sounds to the letters.
- Let the child make the word with letter magnets.
- Have the child write the word on a white board, erase, write another word, then write the target word again.
- Prompt the child to locate the word in the book before reading (ex: “Find the word went”), then read the sentence with that word.
You might also select texts that repeatedly expose students to the same words. For example, for a beginning reader, you might read books with “can” for 3-4 days in a row. For a more advanced reader, you could select books that include the word “wanted” on several pages. (Use some of the techniques listed above each day.) This repeated exposure of examining the word left to right as they read helps students to commit the words to memory more efficiently.
A few final thoughts
Fluent reading doesn’t come naturally for all kids. Sometimes teachers need to specifically teach students to be fluent readers. However, when you use these reading fluency activities, you will be rewarded with improved comprehension for your students. And, you’ll be able to sit back and enjoy some amazing reading!
You might also like these blog posts:
How to Do Readers Theatre in Your K-2 Classroom
Why You Need Readers Theatre in 1st Grade
Free Readers Theater Scripts for Kids: Build Fluency One Script at a Time
