This week I found the readings to be very interesting and pose a very challenging idea about fluency and comprehension. Fluency seems like a huge challenge to me to teach on its own. When I think of a child reading fluently I think about them understanding the word meaning but that is not really true. Looking at it from a college perspective I see how beginning readers would be able to read a word but have no idea what it means, simply because there are times when I do that now with my homework. Then when you tie in the idea of comprehension I can see where students get slowed down in their reading. What I struggle with is how to do you keep teaching both fluency and comprehension to such a large group. In small groups I feel like it would be very manageable but what happens in the case where it is a teacher and 20 students?
An idea for a fluency lesson for Roll of Thunder would be for the students to be broken up into smaller reading groups that are being facilitated by an adult. There will be a selected passage that the adult reads first. Next the passage will be read by everyone in the group together. Then one by one each of the students reads the passage aloud to the group. Then to work on comprehension there will be a small discussion about the passage.
In my classroom there is something similar that happens with learning letter sounds. Each letter of the alphabet has its own book with 10 sentences or so what have a lot of the initial letter sound. They read the book together and circle words and letters they are familiar with.
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Meryl,
After reading your post I thought more about the management in my placement classroom and how my teacher teaches fluency and comprehension to her class of 21 students (all of whom are low level readers. What I realized is that although it seems impossible to us, it is something that you have to deal with everyday in every subject. Even my CT, after 15 years of teaching, says that she has a hard time "reaching every student".
As far as comprehension and fluency goes, I would say that our best bet, as teachers, would be to just keep trying to reach every student and never give up. My CT does a lot of repeat reading. She'll read the same book 4 or 5 times and each time the students pick up a little more of the vocabulary and other pieces of the book. I think this helps them become more fluent because they've heard the words before and it helps them comprehend better because they talk about different aspects of the book each time they read it. I really think the repetition approach works well for the students, they seem to be catching on... its just time consuming!
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