Reading fluency is one of the most important skills for kindergarteners to develop as they learn to read. Reading fluency is the ability to read text quickly and accurately. Once they have a strong grasp of their letters and sounds, they begin sounding out and decoding words. A great way to teach your students to read fluently is by using word families.
Word Family Fluency
To practice our word family reading fluency, we say words orally and listen for the chunks in words. My students start by coming up with words in the “at” family and we sing our word family song. We use our knowledge of word families to help with our reading fluency!
When students gain an understanding of word families and start to see “chunks” in words, they become stronger readers. Instead of sounding out each phoneme, or sound, in the word, they are able to transfer what they know about “chunks” and apply it to their reading. Word family fluency is a great way for your students to practice reading accurately and fluently.
Reading Fluency Game
This reading fluency game is one of our favorites! We use these large foam dice I found at the Dollar Tree. Large dice makes any game fun and since they are foam, they aren’t loud! Teacher win, am I right?! 🙂
I introduce this game during guided reading groups. The students take turns rolling the dice, finding the matching number on the paper, and touching each word as they read it. This also helps them practice 1-to-1 correspondence and tracking. Some of the students who knew 0 letters and 0 sounds at the beginning of kindergarten were reading like champs!
Here’s a short video of one of my students demonstrating how to play the game. Since we are just working on the “at” family words, we only used this mat. As we learn more word families, we will use more! You can try out the “at” family fluency in your classroom too! Grab the free download {here}.
Rhyme to Read
We also use our Rhyme to Read app during reading groups. This is an amazing way to incorporate technology into the classroom and can even be used for distance learning.
We begin working on Book 1 since our focus is the “at family.” The words on the left are an introduction to the words in the story. I have my kids practice reading those words before reading the sentence. The great thing about this app is that is is self-correcting. If my students are stuck on a word family word or sight word, they can just touch the word and it will be read to them. So cool!
We have enjoyed using this app in our classroom so far and I know your students will love it too! You can try one of the stories for free by downloading it from the app store {here}, or you can purchase the whole series {here}. If you use this program, I would love to hear how it goes with your class!
Fluency Practice for Distance Learning
Lastly, I want to share a couple more reading fluency resources that I love to use in the classroom, and are also perfect for distance learning or simply incorporating more technology in your day.
Reading Fluency Passages
The first is this Reading Fluency Passages Bundle. The passages focus on different phonics skills so your students can get a lot of repetition with each skill. They are interactive and fun for the kids and work seamlessly on Seesaw or Google Classroom.
Reading Fluency Boom Cards
Boom Cards have become all the rage lately, especially with distance learning. These are interactive task cards that allow your students to practice skills at school during a technology center or at home. These are great because they are self-checking. I created Reading Boom Cards to help your students work on their fluency practice anywhere!
I hope these tips and resources gave you some ideas for how to help your students rock their reading fluency too!
