Assessing Fluency/ Lesson Outline

A great way to test word identification is by administering an automaticity assessment to test sight-word recognition. If students struggle at recognizing words and non-words, this means they struggle with word recognition. Having students read aloud is a way assess the students reading fluency. Providing modeling in the classroom is a way to help students struggling with word identification and fluency. Students that excel in these areas can model for other and assist fellow classmates who might be struggling. I personally feel that self-recordings are a great way to help motivate students. I struggled with reading aloud as a child but didn't really understand until I was recorded at home reading a book. I sounded very robotic and there was no flow to my reading. This was enough to motivate me to practice and become less embarrassed about reading in front of people.

"Scorpions"

This book contains a TON of dialog and scene changes. Since there is so many characters and dialog, this would be a great piece to do a mini Readers Theater with. I would treat the text like a plat and assign different roles to different students. I would not suggest using the entire novel because it does involve quite a bit of violence toward the end (i.e the usage of guns) and acting out these particular scenes might not be appropriate for younger students. I would pick a chapter or two with the most character involvement and have students read different roles. This will give them practice all parts of prosody - tempo, rhythm, pitch, and phrasing. As stated before, I would not use the entire novel in this lesson.