It’s true one little passage, taught the right way, can help every kid in your class! This is especially true if you have the right passages written to be decodable and engaging !
The lows, highs, language learners, and the little Einsteins can all benefit from the same single sheet of paper. True story. But you have to have the right tools, strategies, and games to make it happen!
Fall units feature picture clues and 1 sentence per line through October.
Each and every week will impress you with how well thought out and engaging the reading and writing units are ! The made-to-match art makes our classroom BEAUTIFUL!
Now teaching kids to become fluent reading just became a lot easier because I am sharing my best secrets!
However, before you can even teach these “Keys to Comprehension and Fluency”, you have to convince the kids that rereading is important.
Are you ready? This is beautiful. I blogged about this a few years ago when I had about 3 readers. So I am going to chat about it again because it is the HEART behind Close Reading, comprehension, and fluency. Every time we read something, we get more from the text. It might be better understanding, it might be more enjoyment, it might be more words per minute. It is probably all of the above! Here is how the heart chart works. It’s a 5 minute lesson that will change the way your students view rereading.
Even though this is a 5 minute lesson you are going to illustrate a whole week’s worth of rereading using 5 different colored markers.
Using voices (the pink sticks) is wildly fun and quite amusing! If you are reading the whole passage or just pulling a sentence, why not read it like an old lady/man? Why not read it in a grumpy voice? The interactive nature of the sticks can keep rereading going for longer than you think.
Reading with voices is only the beginning though! I teach my class Punctuation Poppers. These are the green circles up there. In this case the kids read in their own voice, but when they come across punctuation in their passage, they make a noise. They might BUZZZZ if the bee stick is chosen or VROOM for car stick. They TWEET if the birdie stick is pulled. My favorite though is the surfer stick. The kids say DUDE in their best surfer voice when they come to a punctuation mark. This strategy literally helps the kids read the punctuation. Sometimes we laugh so hard when rereading that I am nervous a kid will wet their pants. I am nervous because it has happened. True story. “What happened buddy?”, I say to the wet child. “I was having fun and forgot I had to pee.”, he said.
OK, speaking of fun. These reading games are OUTRAGEOUS! Crazy Professor comes to us via the Whole Brain movement and I love it with my whole heart! Kids act out text. They are not putting on a play, they are simply moving their hands to match the words. In the picture bottom left, the little girl in green is reading the word White House and making her hands into a roof!
The kids go INSANE for this game. It can be played in pairs, table groups, or whole class. When we do it whole class, I read the passage and they act it out. We call this a Professor Party. In first grade we make up the motions together until the last trimester. Then they are ready to make up their own motions. Coincidentally, the motions tend to go with key vocabulary words and words that need vocal emphasis. So this game is great for vocabulary acquisition and teaching vocal expression.
Reader’s Challenge is a blast too. It’s a verbal game where the teacher reads a familiar passage and pauses on a word. The first child to shout it out wins. Here are the details to play the game. Divide the class in half and line them up on either side of your room.
One competitor from each team comes up. You read from the familiar passage and pause. First to shout the correct answer wins the round.
Winner rejoins their line. The other child sits at their desk. The process of elimination continues until only 1 child remains. If there is ever a tie in the process, just keep reading and pausing until the tie can be broken. Last man standing wins the game for their team. I play this game on Fridays because by then we have worked with the passage all week. Since the kids are not doing any of the reading, your low kids and your language learners we really SHINE.
I use art to motivate my little readers. I do art at least once a week and I do it Tuesday morning. Art is not for “Fridays only” in my room. Click on any picture to view more. 
You might be wondering how I have time to do art once a week. Easy. As we are doing the art, I pull a sentence from the passage, write it on the board and then we pull that sentence apart. While we are cutting out George Washington’s hair, we talk about the sentence and ways to phrase it. Then as we are gluing on the hat, we read the sentence with voices. And so it continues. We keep making the art and pulling apart the sentence.
By the time we are done with the 20 minute art project, I have reviewed several “Keys” and taken a few minutes to discuss the sentence from a phrasing and grammar point of view.
A huge help in building readers who are fluent and can comprehend, is having daily 7 minute reading buddies. I go into this concept in GREAT detail in the unit, but I have to say that it is one of the main elements to a successful reading program.
Dibels is a free resource, but I encourage you to think about maximizing your school day. I don’t love Dibels because it’s a lot of narrative text. Do your students really need to spend the WHOLE week reading about a rainy day picnic??? I would rather have them read a social studies or science text. And the truth is, the kids would rather read about the real world too. It is enriching, engaging material. It sparks their creativity, curiosity, and it fills their brain/schema with information to write about! PLUS, if you can get a social studies or science grade out of it, that is a major bonus! Please remember it is essential to choose the right material since they are going to be reading it all week. The other HUGE component to a rocking reading program is graphing. THIS is where the kids blossom! Unless you make reading growth visual, with a graph, they cannot sense their own growth.
Kids hear us say, “You’ll be a better reader if you practice.” But they must ask themselves, “When?” If you stop to think about it, the language arts story gets harder every week. So their struggle continues week to week. Graphing is how kids can see that they are indeed becoming better readers! Also graphing their daily words per minute with their big buddy is a HUGE confidence builder. My students are addicted to the successful feeling that graphing gives them. I provided 4 different graphs for you to choose from. You know who else LOVES the graph? Parents. Most parents live and die seeing their child grow to be successful. Graphing gives the parents a tremendous amount of joy and increases the drive to help their children with their reading. 
Are you ready to have the time of your life teaching reading comprehension and fluency? Please join me! It is so fun and gets you results and data your admin is demanding. Your students will be engaged, happy, and strong readers using the strategies I talked about and tons I did not cover from this unit.
