I Can Read This So Good!

It took me years to perfect my phonics instruction. I knew that I wanted it to be explicit and systematic. I also wanted it to be complete. Too many programs left out some important, but less common phonics patterns, and this left my struggling readers to flounder.

When I finally put together a phonics program that was truly complete, I started seeing results almost immediately. Most of my students really shot ahead in reading.

But a handful of children in my class continued to struggle. There seemed to be a missing piece. These kids know their phonics sounds, but they were so slow and halting. I could tell they needed help with fluency. And fluency activities did help, especially repeated readings, but it wasn't enough.

I had a boy in my third grade class, I'll call him Jeremy, who had been tagged as twice exceptional. He was gifted and dyslexic. Jeremy wasn't just in my lowest reading group. He was in a reading group of one; He was that far behind even the lowest readers in my class. Jeremy was miserable. In some ways, the success of my phonics program made things worse for Jeremy because the rest of the class was doing so well while he continued to lag. He would trudge into class as if he were carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.

I had to find something that worked. Typical fluency passages were not effective. They were too long, and they overwhelmed struggling readers with too many phonics patterns. I created my own fluency passages. I kept them short, around fifty words. More importantly, I limited the phonics patterns they contained and sequenced them with plenty of review.

I remember Jeremy's first time with this new type of fluency passage. It was limited to the short /a/ sound in CVC words. It took him three times to get through the passage in under a minute. He was so excited. At the end of the day, he ran to his mom waving the reading passage and shouting, “I can read this so good!” I started sending the passages home with Jeremy for extra practice.

Soon he was able to join with a group of other students for reading. That's when I found that these passages were beneficial for the whole group. Each passage emphasized the phonics pattern we were working on that day. Practicing these patterns to the point of fluency made my phonics instruction that much more effective.

I thought of my experience when I saw the Common Core video. I was especially struck by the observation”...at the moment kids can read the words on the page, fluency starts to be a factor.” Fluency should not be taught separately from phonics. Fluency and phonics are integral to each other. 

 

For more fluency and phonics exercises, please look at the items in my store.