They are spending less brain energy decoding and thus have more energy to spend on reading for accuracy, speed, and comprehension.īut remember phonics instruction does not go away. Once students can do the above skills with automaticity, they are on their way to becoming more fluent readers. To get more practice on decoding in context with supporting activities check out the Decodable Readers with Word Work Activities here. And yes, you should be teaching your students to decode sight words. Thus it makes a short a sound instead of long. Did you know that no English word can end in the letters I, U, V, or J? Knowing this simple rule can help students understand why the word have ends with an e and not the letter v. One thing you may not have considered is teaching your students the rules of English at this time. Students need time and instruction to practice blending sounds and decoding words. This is an essential step in the progression towards fluent reading. We do this by giving students activities using the letters and sounds they know to read (decode) and encode (write). Most likely you will already be practicing these skills during your phonemic awareness time so it will hopefully be a concept your students are already working on.īut now it’s time to add print. Going from speech to print, we start with blending or breaking down sounds orally before moving to print. The next step after sounds is putting those sounds together to decode word parts or even full words. Building Reading Fluency: Teach Decoding Skills Read more about sounds wall in kindergarten and first grade here. Using explicit instruction through a sound wall such as the one found in the Phonics and Phonemes Bundle here students will build that foundation for sounds. Average readers can take anywhere from 4-10 exposures and struggling readers can take many many more times to make those connections from speech to print sounds. They need to engage in rich activities that will help them to remember them. Students need explicit instruction on connecting those sounds they hear to print. So it makes sense to start with hearing and manipulating sounds orally first. Let’s think about this, kindergarteners come to use knowing a ton of language and often not a whole lot of letters or graphemes or even their relationships to one another. More and more research shows that students do better with learning sounds when going from speech to print. Important to note that even fluent readers are still segmenting and decoding words but are able to process them so quickly and automatically that it requires little brain effort. Think of these as linking the roots to a tree. They also need to be segmenting sounds orally, blending sounds, and decoding with confidence. Students need to have a strong understanding of sounds, letters, and speech before they can be fluent readers. Not all kindergarteners will get to this level and that’s okay but here are some tips to help students move towards the ultimate goal of reading more fluently. Students that are reading fluently will read effortlessly, sound smooth, and have expression. Fluent readers have moved from knowing letter sounds to segmenting and blending words and are now more automatic in their ability to read. Simply stated, a fluent reader is one who can read with accuracy, speed, expression, and automaticity.
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