Dr. Seuss Helps Students Become Fluent Readers

It is extremely important that students become fluent in reading. Once students become fluent readers they will be able to comprehend text much faster and easier. Students who are not fluent reader spend most of their time reading decoding words. Below is a plan that can be incorporated into any lesson that helps students become fluent readers.

I have incorporated five fluency building strategies into my plan. In order to better aquanaut yourself with reading fluency we need to first understand the five components of literacy. These components are phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary development, comprehension, and fluency. These components exist to help teachers effectively teach students how to be successful readers.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds in spoken words. Phonemes are the sounds of individual letters that are put together to form words. Phonemes can change the meaning of spoken words. It is important that students are aware of how sounds work before they start to read. .

Phonics teaches children the relationships between the letters of written language and the individual sounds of spoken language. A phoneme is the sound that a individual letter makes and a grapheme is a unit of written language. Phonics is used to help student understand that sounds are combined to form words. Students that do not comprehended phonemes or hear them often have difficulty with phonics. In order for students to read accurately, words that students are attempting to read must be a part of their oral language

It is also important that students build a strong vocabulary in order for them to be successful readers. Having a strong vocabulary helps students communicate successfully. Students have an oral vocabulary that they use when they reading and speaking. Vocabulary helps students to understand what they have read or just heard. For example, If I just said a word and you have no idea what it means, then more than likely you don't understand what I am talking about, that is way vocabulary is important. Children begin to build their vocabularies at a young age, their vocabulary is mostly like words that they hear at home or school a lot. As students read and listen to others they gradually build their vocabulary over time.

Comprehension is very important when it comes to reading, with out it student would not understand any thing that they have read. Comprehension involves reading a text and then construct a meaning from it. It is important hat students learn to monitor their comprehension, this allows them to make sure they understanding the text correctly.

Fluency is the ability to read text at a reasonable pace and read it accurately. Students who are fluent reader spend little time decoding words and can spend more time on comprehending the text and applying.

It is extremely important that teachers keep the above components in mind when teaching reading. The above comments will take time to be devolved in students, some students may take longer than other. Other students will need to learn to master these complaints at a faster and slower pace than others. Each of the above components build on

the others.

Fluency Building Strategies

There are several different strategies that a teacher can use to help build a students reading fluency. Below I have discussion five strategies to promote students reading fluency. The first way to promote reading fluency is to model it. This is necessary because before students become fluent readers, they must first hear and understand what fluent reading sounds like. This is often the most successful way to help students build reading fluency. Teachers can model fluent reading by reading out loud to students and using lots of expressions when reading. Teachers also need to expose students to many different types of literary genres.

A second way to help students become fluent readers is to do repeated readings in class. This strategy helps students to pick up on high frequencies words quickly. This can be done by having students repeating a short passage that the teacher has just read out loud. Teachers can do this by reading a short poem that has been transferred to the board or overhead several times, while students follow along. The teacher should then discuses the poem with students and then engage in echo reading. Echo reading is where the teacher will read one line and then students will repeat it.

A third way to help students become fluent readers is to promote reading in phrase rather than word by word. This can be done by coping a poem on to sentence strips line by line. This cues to students that good readers cluster words, rather than reading them one at a time.

A fourth way to help students become fluent readers is by having tutors or other students to helps students who are not fluent readers. Teacher may choose to let upper classmen come into the classroom every day to work with younger students. These sessions can be as short as 15 minutes every day. This also gives older students a chance to be leaders.

A fifth way to help students become fluent readers is by using readers theater. Readers theater is an oral performance from a book or script. During readers theater, meaning is expressed through expression and intonation. This causes students to focus on interpreting the script rather than memorizing it. In order to have students take part in readers theater, they will need a script and should practice reading it out loud with the class several times. After the script has been read out load teachers should then do a echo read and a choral read of the script to involve the entire class. Next the teacher need to put together a few props and customs or face make up and invite other classes to come watch the performance.

Reading Fluency Activities

Below is a plan that can be used over a five day period to build fluency in reading. The plan is designed for a second grade classroom. The general ideas of this plan can easily be used for a Dr. Seuss unit.

Day 1

I will start a discussion about Dr. Seuss. The class will use their prior knowledge of Dr. Seuss to construct a KWLW chart. I can help the dissuasion along by asking students to discuss any book by Dr. Seuss that they may be familiar with. We will discuss the book that students are familiar with as a class and create a chart of the books.

As a class we will read "Dr. Seuss's ABC: An Amazing Alphabet Book" After reading the book students will paired together, students with a higher reading level will be paired with students that have a lower reading ability. Paris will then be assigned to a computers to complete a learning activity from www.randomhouse.com/seussville. Once students access the above site they will click on the learning activity that goes with the book we have read. While visiting this website students will be required to read Dr. Seuss's biography. In this lesson students are using phonemic awareness to build fluency .For this learning activity, students will practice matching words to their beginning sounds.

Day 2

Students will fill in the blanks on their KWLW chart from the previous day. Students will fill in what they have learned from reading the Dr. Seuss book and visiting the above website. Next we will read another book by Dr. Seuss. After reading the book students will complete an activity from the above website that corresponds with the book. The book I have chosen for this activity is "Fox in Socks" After reading this book we will review the sound that the letter "O" makes. This is a phonics activity. Student will be assigned the task of thinking of words that have the short "o" sound in them. These words can then be listed on the board.

Day 3

On day three I will lead student in a short discussion on story elements. During computer time students will take turns using the computers to complete short learning activities that corresponds to the unit. Once computer time has been completed I will read "Oh, the Places You'll Go!" This book will help students to build their vocabularies. Next I will select three unknown words from this book. After I read the book to students I will introduced the three words that I have selected. First, I will say the word and then have students repeat after me. Next I will give the definition of each words followed by several examples and non-examples. Next I will ask students to volunteer and describe each word that we have just learned. Once students have a general idea of what each word is, we will all stand up as a class and Chant the words and their meanings.

Day 4

Today we will read "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish" .On day four we will be using a Venn diagram to compare and contrast to of the books that we have read together in class. The Venn diagram help students comprehend material. To complete the Venn diagram students will be required to recall information from previous text, thus strengthening their compression skills. The rest of the day will be used for students to catch up or review any material that they may need to retouch on.

Day 5

Today we will be reading "Sam I Am" by Dr. Seuss. Once the reading of this book is complete I will have the class vote to determine what their favorite book was. I will chart the information on the board Next, students will use the computers to e-mail another class from a different school about the unit on Dr Seuss Students will report the results from vote to the other class. During math each student use the information to create a graph to go along with the chart. I will use the results from the voting, to create math words. Students will then return to the computer to complete the final learning activity.

Once learning actives are complete I will then re-read the book that received the most votes. When the book is read this time, I will ask students to help me read it. This will helps students to develop fluency. This will be a book that students have read during reading group time. Students will be told they need to read the book as fluent and as fast as they can in one minute. The teacher will model appropriate reading to students. Students will begin to read on the teacher cue. After one minute is up students will mark the last word they read using highlighter tape. The next day students will get the book out again and try to read past their highlighter mark in one minute.