Reading Fluency Junior Classes

Hi everyone,

Following on from the popular post on Reading fluency for Senior Classes, this post will focus on fluency in the Junior Classes.

Sight Words

In Infants you should try and focus on their fluency on sight words. I developed my own prompt cards to use with my class. I took a set of sight words (4 or more) and used a grid with 12-15 spaces. The same words were repeated in the grid and the aim was to identify and read the words at speed.

The children would complete the activity as part of their station teaching and I would record it in their homework journal. Then I sent the cards home to repeat the activity and asked the parents to record the time in the journal. The children really enjoyed trying to beat their time throughout the week.

These prompt cards are available in my Mash.ie store.

This activity can be developed further in Senior Infants and First Class with the use of fry’s phrases. They are sets of phrases that use the Dolch words. They start at three word sentences for Senior Infants and are available for the first, second and third 100 words. 

In my post for older children I outlined using the PEAS to remind children for reading fluency, this could be adapted and used in 2nd class also.

One last thing to remember is to demonstrate reading fluency yourself to the class by reading aloud and making them aware of the different steps or methods that they need to remember.

A.M.