Fluency and Mini-Lesson

To assess fluency, it is important that you consider the speed of a child's reading as well as their prosody. From timing the child's reading, and listening for inflection and word recognition, these are all important factors in determining a child's current level of fluency. More importantly than merely determining the child's level of fluency is tracking their progress. Students should be improving over time no matter what there level of fluency is. Tracking a student's progress in fluency and word recognition allows you to understand what techniques work and do not work for each individual student.
Using my book club novel which is titled The Breadwinner, the fluency lesson I would create would focus on prosody. This book is at a fourth or fifth grade reading level, and many students in this age group have good word recognition, but need work on improving their prosody. Because there are many characters exchanging dialogue in this novel, I would have the students act out a chapter each in small groups. There are fifteen chapters so not every chapter could be done in front of the class but having one group a week perform a chapter in front of the class would allow the students designated to act out the chapter develop better prosody, and this would also allow the rest of the students watching to get a more dramatic picture of what is happening in the story.