Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Winter Edition of Fluency Tips, Activities, and Freebies



Although winter is officially more than 3 weeks away, many have already experienced the cold and the snow. As we head into the holiday and winter season many of your students have been identified as needing more fluency activities to help them become proficient readers. What the research findings have showed is that 44% of American fourth graders cannot read fluently. According to Worthy J. and Broaddus K, effective fluency practice includes practice and explicit instruction. It is effectively accomplished through a variety of strategies and methods including:

  • Whole class readings
  • Performance
  • Oral repeated readings
  • Buddy or paired reading
  • Assisted reading
The components of fluency include:
  • Accuracy and automaticity of decoding words accurately and effortlessly
  • Reading at an age and grade level appropriate rate or speed
  • Reading with smoothness, phrasing, and inflection
  • Comprehending the main ideas
Explicit Instruction includes the following Fluency Tasks:
  • Fluent Letter recognition
  • Fluent Word recognition
  • Fluent Word decoding
  • Fluent reading of connected text
These tasks need to be scaffolded starting at the level of where your students are. Many struggling readers may only be at the word recognition or decoding level which is where their explicit instruction should begin. Explicit instruction should focus on accuracy, rate, and expression. 

EngageNY uses the MAPP approach to help build student's fluency: Modeling, Assistance, Practice, and Performance. Practice includes not just reading texts (whisper reading independently or pair read) but poetry and readers theater. Researches state that poetry is extremely beneficial in not only building fluency but also with phrasing, and inflection. 

Over the past several months I have created 3 Fluency Activities Packets: one for Summer, Back to School, and Fall. I have incorporated these research findings into my units to help meet the needs of all your students in your classroom. I have had many buyers ask if I would be creating one for Winter which I just uploaded a few days ago. It is definitely the longest one as I've tried to add more words and reading texts. There are so many winter words to incorporate and use with both high frequency and decodable words when reading sentences and connected texts. It begins with a variety of word fluency activities and assessments.
Followed by phrase and sentence fluency activities and assessments.
Ending with reading texts, poems, readers theater partner reading, and assessments.
You can check out the entire packet by clicking on the image below to read the description, table of contents, and download the Preview file. I have put it on sale through Sunday morning, November 30th.
If you are looking for just a Winter Words Fluency Game for your students you may like my fun and free Winter Edition of "Don't Get Skunked."
 You can check it out by clicking on the image below. It includes all the winter words that are in my Winter Fluency Activities Packet and a few more.




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Thanks for all you do to make a difference for your students. Have a very Happy Thanksgiving! 


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TBA

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

All about Turkeys: Free Resources and Free Reading Activity Packet

I love Turkey and Thanksgiving. Turkeys are one of only two birds that are native to North America. They have been around for a very long time, even before Christopher Columbus discovered America.They are actually quite intelligent and social. I did a lot of research to learn as much as I could about turkeys for my new thematic unit called  "All About Turkeys."  I put together some websites where you can also get free resources about turkeys.

The first one has lots of information for kids and teachers about turkeys and some free printables. You can access it by clicking on the image below.
National Geographic also has some interesting information about turkeys which you can access by clicking on the image below.
You will find 20 interesting facts about turkeys by clicking on the image below.
I found this wonderful book from Scholastic at Amazon. There are more books below this one. To access it just click on the image below.
My new Turkey Unit has several reading texts about turkeys including one about the history of the presidential pardon of a turkey at the White House. There are also Picture/Fact Cards about Domestic Turkeys, Wild Male and Female Turkeys, and Baby Turkeys called Poults. There are 2 different Compare and Contrast Writing Activities to choose from.
Students will decide whether statements are Facts or Opinions in both a whole class activity as well as one about the text about the presidential pardon. All the texts are differentiated at the 2nd and 3rd Grade levels.
If you would like to check out all just click on the image below. You can see sample pages of all the differentiated reading texts plus many other activities in this packet when you download the Preview file.

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Thanks for all you do to make a difference for your students. 


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Teaching Blog Addict

Sunday, November 2, 2014

Early Bird Fall Special and Freebie

Did you get up early today? Even though I stayed up really late last night I got up really early and decided to have an Early Bird Fall Fluency Special Sale today. My Fall Fluency Activities Packet will be 50% today only. ( This product is now $2.00 off the original price until November 9th) It is jammed packed with 114 pages of great fluency activities and assessments. It is great for RTI and ESL students, too. It starts with word fluency activities and assessments as you can see below.
Then phrase and sentence fluency and assessments. 
Then finally Fluency Cards, Poems, 1st and 2nd Grade Reading Texts, and Readers Theater Scripts and Assessments.
Just click on the image below to check it out and get a free activity with the download.
If you would like to read more about my Fall Fluency Packet just click HERE.
Thanks for all you do to make a difference for your students. 

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