Ways to Help Middle School Students with Fluency:
- There are several ways I have found to help with fluency at the middle school level. One of the best is readers' theater and choral readings. Poems for Two Voices is also effective and nonthreatening. Sometimes I teach specific lessons about phrasing and intonation using different words underlined on a card for emphasis, and the same sentence with a variety of punctuation at the end for the voice to go up or down.
- Read Naturally is a good program to practice fluency also. Students do cold reads, practice the paragraph, then do hot reads and record their words read in 1 minute. There is usually a marked improvement with this. A comprehension piece is also in place with questions to answer after the readings.
- Having students hear good modeling of fluent reading is so important in the form of teacher read-a-loud or echo reading. Some students may just need to work on high frequency words to become more automatic with them. A phrase card game is a good end of class filler where they pull out phrases from a can and read them as the can goes around the circle. If they draw the card "bang" they have to put all their cards back in the can. At the end I have the students lay out their phrases and make up a short story with them. This can be done in just 5 minutes.