Not all warm-up words are the same:
- Some warm-up words, like study, align to the phonics focus pattern. They will always appear first in the list.
- Words with a heart over them, like give and have, indicate words that are irregularly spelled, partially decodable, and occur frequently in text. Students only need to learn the irregularly spelled portion by memory or “by heart” — in the word give, ‘ive’ is pronounced /ĭv/.
- Words in italics, like time, are outside the sequence of the decodable series and are included because they help form a coherent story. When you get to these words in the warm-up, you can tell students what the word says so that they do not guess.
Model reading each warm-up word, pointing as you read it aloud. Next, invite children to join you in reading the words together and then on their own. Provide support and feedback as needed, encouraging them to point to the words as you read aloud together.
Step 3: Read the Decodable Passage
At this point, you are ready to read the passage to your students. This can be done as a whole class, where every student has a copy of the text on their desk and you have a copy displayed on the board, or in small groups or one-on-one.
Model reading the passage with appropriate phrasing and intonation aligning with the punctuation.
Invite children to join you in reading the passage together, making sure they are pointing to the words as they read, while you provide support and feedback as needed. Depending on the student you are working with, you may need to read one sentence at a time, a few sentences at a time, or a paragraph at a time.
You may ask individual students to read a section or all of the passage aloud, providing support and feedback as needed. Whenever anyone is reading, all children should be attending to the print by pointing to the words. This adds to individual practice!
Step 4: Develop Language and Reading Comprehension Skills, Too!
Reading decodable text is for students to practice their decoding abilities, but it’s also an important opportunity for students to learn new vocabulary and think about meaning.
Each decodable text comes with a language extension section to help develop comprehension after students have accurately decoded the text. This includes vocabulary words from the passage and comprehension questions. While optional, the language extension helps interconnect the phonics and language comprehension skills students need for independent reading.
Step 5: Measure Students’ Speed and Accuracy
Decodable passages can also be used to measure accuracy and fluency. Numbers at the end of each line provide a word count, helping you track the number of words students read correctly. While regular timed readings aren’t recommended with connected text until the middle of first grade, the word counts from decodable text can help you begin to measure accuracy and rate and can incentivize children to build fluency.
Follow these steps to calculate individual students’ accuracy, with the goal being 95 to 100 percent accurate:
- Encourage students to be accurate, not speedy. Rate should be at the speed of conversation. Begin the timer when the student utters the first word in the passage. Mark each word that they stumble over or read incorrectly. When students finish reading the passage, record their total reading time.
- To find how many words were read correctly, subtract the number of errors from the total number of words in the passage.
- Next, find the accuracy rate (expressed as a percentage) by dividing words read correctly by the total number of words in the passage. For example, if they read 90 words accurately out of 100, their accuracy rate would be 90 divided by 100, or 90 percent.
Note: When calculating accuracy and fluency in a grade-level passage, the student will be timed for 60 seconds. Therefore, the student may not finish the entire passage and the calculations would be based on the words attempted, not the number of words in the passage.
If you need a little more help, check out our fluency calculator reference card.
