Pursuing Fluency

As I have talked about in previous blog posts, I was caught once again by another example of using a text over a period of days, rather than having a one-and-done reading of it. Students in Ms. Williams class, featured in the vignette at the beginning of the chapter, had read A House for Hermit Crab numerous times, and Ms. Williams still included it for students to read on their own at the class's listening center (Tompkins 150). This practice is particularly useful for fluency because multiple exposures to a text help to increase a student's base of sight words, i.e. words they can recognize immediately upon sight. Read Green Eggs and Ham in virtually any classroom and you'll see what I mean: many students have the book practically memorized. Of course, memorization does not necessarily build fluency; however, repeated exposure when the text is presented to the class (as Ms. Williams did at her literacy center) seems bound to help students make connections between the words they hear and those they see on the page.

As we see in this vignette, learning high-frequency words so that they become sight words is an important development in a student's fluency. This is particularly the case for words that are difficult to sound out, or whose meaning is not easily discernible from context. Tompkins offers 'to,' 'what,' and 'could' as examples of words that fit into both of these categories (156-7). Ms. Williams successfully used fill-in-the-blank activities to teach high-frequency words (152, 154). These activities, since they were so well designed, put the words in meaningful contexts, used some words repeatedly, and allowed the students to decide upon their placement based on both their formal and informal knowledge of the words.

I appreciated the word-identification strategies (Tompkins 162-70), since I am often faced with students asking me, "How do you spell ________?" Usually, I'll tell them to try sounding it out, which is, I now know, a prompt for them to use phonic analysis, the first strategy. If the word is 'gave', for instance, then I'll walk with them as they make each sound. If they end up with 'gav,' I will ask them something like, "What letter do you add that makes the 'a' say its name?" They'll usually add the 'e.' But with a word like 'dove,' for example, I have always been at a loss for how to help them. I realize now that this is because I always try to use phonic analysis, while other strategies work better for words like this. Take the analogies strategy, for example. (The remaining two strategies, syllabic analysis and morphemic analysis, seem mostly too advanced for my first- and second-graders.) If a student asks me how to spell 'dove,' I could ask them, "Can you think of any other words that sound like 'dove'?" Perhaps they say "glove," and they know how to spell it; then they are well on their way to inferring the spelling of 'dove.'

Dave Koch