Flourishing through Fluency……

On my many visits to schools around Northamptonshire and beyond, one of the things I take the most pleasure in seeing is a class full of children reading together. There is something truly magical and heart-warming about this wonderful, shared experience. When this is done well; the text is carefully chosen, the children are motivated and engaged, they are actively participating in the experience and sharing their enjoyment- there really is nothing better.

But how do we ensure every child can enjoy this rewarding shared experience? Especially as the text we have chosen is challenging, multi-layered, thought provoking, the kind of text they might not pick up and read at home?

Fluency is the key….

Without this we cannot give the children a truly inclusive and collaborative experience from which they can all benefit.

So how do we teach fluency?

Well for a start it helps if they have read this text several times and are familiar with it. This is when fluency can really flourish.

We already know all about how the brain and memory works; little and often, small bites at the cherry, over exposure, practise, practise, practise. We do this so well with our phonics schemes and programmes (3 reads a week and an extra one at home) so we must take from what we know works well in KS1 and inject that powerful recipe into our KS2 reading curriculum.

One of the most important things we must do is make it fun. It must be enjoyable and motivational for all our children.

I like to think of it a bit like getting ready for a performance; like actors in a theatre production preparing for the performance of their lifetime. Playscripts……wouldn’t it be better to read and perform these instead of writing them? William Shakespeare, Alfred Noyles, William Blake, who knew the classics could be so much fun! Asking the children to practice and perform their favourite play or poem to be filmed and published for a real audience incentivises repeated reading for a truly authentic purpose. Mix it up and try nonsense rhymes and limericks, Spike Milligan and Michal Rosen.…maybe even Jeff Kinney if that’s what they love to read. Let them play around with this and choose the books they like, act out a scene with 2 of the characters from Barry Loser or Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

This can happen across the entire curriculum if we look for the opportunities. Play a YouTube or BBC Bitesize clip in your Geography lesson about the Water Cycle, go to the settings and share the sub-titles. Copy and paste them, then edit it and print them off so they can read it at the same time. They can then practise reading it themselves and record their own voice over for the film.  They will be practising fluency without even knowing it!

So many reading lessons I visit are really enhanced by those brilliant fluency strategies; teacher modelling, echo reading, choral reading and paired reading but some of these strategies are much more powerful than others when it comes to practising fluency.

Without a doubt the most powerful strategy is teacher modelling. This is key. Maybe some of your children need another bite at the cherry if you know they will find the text hard to read. Share the vocabulary with them before hand, not just written down but spoken so they can hear it and practise saying it out loud themselves. Record yourself reading the text aloud and let them listen to it before the lesson. They will need to see the text and read it at the same time, with the key vocabulary highlighted. A listening station with iPads and headphones is ideal for this. In my opinion, we don’t see this enough in KS2 classrooms.

Paired reading is so powerful, but we need to train the pupils to do it well, to really support each other and understand that both roles are active roles, just like schools do so well in the RWI SSP.

Echo reading is also a highly effective strategy if we have really prepared the text and know how we will read it aloud. Text marking and narrating the text to show them why we read it this way brings together the two very powerful elements of fluency and comprehension; after all, we can’t have one without the other!

Be careful of choral reading – its good but it’s not always fluent! Sometimes everyone reading aloud at the same time can lead to that robot type reading we really want to avoid.

As with everything, less is more. We must be selective about the fluency strategies we use and make sure the children know why we are using them.

So finally, fluency or ‘fluentem’ in Latin, means to flow – like a river. Just like a river, fluency takes time and persistence. But with the right strategies—whether it is teacher modelling, paired reading, or creative performances—your students will steadily flow toward that ultimate goal: confident, independent reading. So don’t rush it, just keep going, little and often, every day. It will be worth it when our readers reach the goal of fluency as this is when their reading will truly flourish.