21 - Colegio NUEVA GRANADA

Colegio NUEVA GRANADA December 2012
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P R I M A R Y
SCHOOL
One of the many things I enjoy about being a Primary School
principal is the opportunity to visit different classrooms and listen
to children read. This may sound like a simple thing, but I still
find it fascinating to go into a kindergarten or first grade room
and listen to students just learning how to put sounds together
to form words and sentences. Then, as students progress through
the grades, I can hear the results of their practice and experience
in reading as they learn to decode more effortlessly, beginning to
read with expression and fluency. Of course, this is not something
that just happens on its own. The time the students spend reading
in class, at home, on their own and with parents, teachers, siblings
and friends all combine to help make reading an automatic skill.
Jeff Lough, a former colleague of mine and the former director of
the Mariposa School of Global Education in California, wrote an
article on reading fluency that has some valuable insights and
suggestions when it comes to teaching reading to our young students.
The following are excerpts from his article:
“While the ultimate goal of learning to read is comprehension,
reading fluency is often measured as a primary predictor of reading
success. Reading Fluency is defined as the ability to read words
accurately and quickly, and is highly correlated with reading comprehension.
Metaphorically speaking, think of learning to drive a
car with a manual transmission. At first, we are using a great deal
of brain power to think about the coordination of the clutch and
gas while maintaining concentration on the road around us, where
we are going, our speed, etc. As we become better with time and
practice, the coordination comes without much thought and our
brain is freed up to focus on different things such as listening to
music and talking to passengers. When children first learn to read,
their efforts are primarily focused on decoding individual words.
Once reading the individual words becomes fluent, children can
use higher brain functions to focus their energies on such tasks
as understanding the meaning of what they are reading, making
predictions, and identifying with the feelings of the characters.
In a collaborative effort to continue the wonderful progress our
students are making in reading, we would like to offer the following
strategies to improve reading fluency when reading with your
child at home. These strategies are not grade specific and require
that your child is currently reading connected text (i.e., sentences
and paragraphs). Of course, whether they are reading sentences or
not, reading to or with your children daily is always a great way
Reading:
The Key to Unlocking Future Learning
by: Tom Spence
Primary School Principal
improve their reading and hopefully instill a life-long love for you
and reading.
Five researched-based strategies for improving oral reading fluency
include the following:
1. Read with your child first by modeling fluent reading, then
have her reread the text aloud independently. By listening
to good models of fluent reading, children learn how a
reader’s voice can help written text make sense.
2. Have your child repeatedly read passages aloud with guidance.
A good strategy for developing fluency is to provide
your child with many opportunities to read the same passage
orally several times.
3. What your child reads makes a difference. Fluency develops
as a result of many opportunities to practice reading with
a high degree of success. Therefore, your child should practice
orally rereading text that is reasonably easy for them
– that is, text containing mostly words that they know or
can decode easily. A good rule for determining the best level
for independent reading is no more than one mistake in
twenty words.
4. Read chorally with your child. By reading aloud with good
fluency at the same time (or even slightly faster) your children
will improve in their own fluency.
5. Tape-assisted reading. There are plenty of books at your
child’s independent reading level on audiotape or CD.
These can be downloaded online, purchased at a bookstore,
or checked out from the local library. (Again, a child’s independent
reading level is no more than one mistake for every
twenty words). Have your child read along in his book
as he hears a fluent reader reading the book on tape or CD.”
For a child, the experience of learning to read is not only exciting,
it is empowering. In the Primary School, our goal is to build a solid
reading foundation for our students. This means giving them the
time, instruction, and strategies to master their decoding skills in
order for them to begin reading with fluency, accuracy, expression
and comprehension. When parents partner with us in this endeavor,
our students benefit exponentially and are soon able to make the
transition from “learning to read” to “reading to learn”.
PRIMARY
SCHOOL
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