How to Teach a Phonics Lesson: Reading with Fluency

Carla Stanford: Now we are going to talk about reading with fluency. And this can be at the end of the lesson where you work intentionally on kids reading with accuracy, reading with a good rate or speed, and adding in that expression when you're reading phrases or sentences. So this can look two ways. You can go back to the dictation that you've done and use the words, phrases, and sentences to read them back because we know we always read what we wrote. You can also have a read sheet that you display on your whiteboard or you give kids individually and you do the same kind of process with your read sheet. 

So we're going to practice using our dictation from the lesson. These are the directions that I usually give my kids. Okay? You know that we always read what we wrote. So now we're going to look back at our dictation. You can look at your paper or you can read off of the board. You make the decision. We're going to tap and read the first row together. Tappers up. /l/, /ŭ/, /k/, luck. Second one, /d/, /ŭ/, /k/, duck. Excellent. On this next row, I want you to tap silently and we will grab and read together. Now you can do this version of the tapping if kids are really ready to read without all the scaffolding of tapping, so that you are giving everyone an opportunity to do the work. So your directions are tap your head. We'll scoop together. Swim. Thick. And on thick, that may be a hard sound. If you hear kids read it and it was not accurate, then that's when you could tap together. You could say, oh, that's a tricky sound. Everyone make the /th/ sound. Let's do it. You ready? /th/, /ĭ/, /k/, thick. And if it was really hard work for your kids, you may want to go back and read together. And sometimes I give them a little beat and say, okay, we're going to read together. One, two, ready, go. Luck. Duck. Swim. Thick. Quick. Flock. Splash. Pond. Excellent job. Now we'll move to our phrases. And in our phrases, we took words from our words and we put them here. So now we're going to go in and read our phrase. Get ready. First word, flock. Good. Let's read the first one and add our second word. "Flock of." Excellent. Now let's scoop it all together. "Flock of ducks." One more time. "Flock of ducks." Altogether. "Flock of ducks." Excellent. And you can get them to add that expression. 

Now is the fun part. You're to the sentences. They've done all the heavy lifting, they've shown you that they can tap and read the words, and now they get to put it in this context, these sentences, which they have written by the way. So you come down to the bottom and you can say, we are going to scoop these together. I'm going to model for you how we're going to scoop 'em. So we're going to keep our who or what together. So we're going to say, "the flock of ducks." We're going to scoop that together. That's the who or what in the sentence. Next we're going to scoop in "splash." That's the did what. Splash. So now we have "The flock of ducks splash." Where did they splash? In the pond. So now we have three scoops that we can work on reading our words accurately with some speed. We're scooping it up and we can add that expression. And that's what fluent reading is. We were building all the pieces necessary to get to this part.

So we have, "The flock of ducks splash in the pond." Let's do it together. Eyes up here reading. "The flock of ducks splash in the pond." The way we scooped was very intentional. We worked really hard to emphasize the who or what. This is a great way to build in that understanding of the way sentences are built intentionally in order to communicate. We're scooping up our namer and our action. And then we also had our when and where and why in our sentences, because we know that fluency is the bridge from decoding to comprehension. And that is the goal of this work here, that you really intentionally capitalize on the words that you chose, the meanings you've talked about. You build them into phrases and sentences so your kids have an opportunity to read them and see how being able to decode, being able to really deeply think about a word and have the word in context is the essence of skilled, proficient reading.

Narrator: Reading Universe is made possible by generous support from Jim and Donna Barksdale; the Hastings/Quillen Fund an Advised Fund of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation; the AFT; the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation; and anonymous donors.