Comprehension

Comprehension, while possibly the most important part of reading, is often the hardest to explicitly teach. Often times it is just understood that you should be comprehending what you are reading. This is probably because comprehension comes from the interaction between the reader and the text. Comprehension is very dependent on the individual reader.

As teacher's the best thing to do is to create an environment and activities support a reader's ability to comprehend. The first thing that came to my mind was taking time to do read alouds. This can be a good way to make sure each child is read information in the same, interesting way, and therefore had the exact same chance to comprehend the information, despite reading skill level.

What are some other ways to promote comprehension in the classroom?

This is a chart I found that gives children ways to work on comprehension while reading stories.

Decoding Words

I really enjoyed reading about the “Making Words” Lesson. If planned correctly, this could be a great, fun way for children to learn many words, including “word families”. 

The school I am currently in requires a CARE lesson every morning in which the children decode words and write them down. It is such a boring and long task. It would definitely make the CARE lessons a little bit more fun if the children were able to make their own words by using their own manipulatives.

The children do use their fingers to decode words by putting up a finger each time hear a sound in the word. This seems to work well to make sure that each letter is recognized and written down to form the words.

This is a picture of a bunch of different decoding strategies that children can use to figure out words. I love that it gives so many options for children to try. This would be great to have up in the classroom as a constant reminder to the children of all the different ways they can figure out the words by themselves.

Do you have any decoding strategies that are not on here?

If you know what CARE is, do you have any good ways to make it more fun for the children?

Fluency

The Literacy Dictionary says accuracy, rate, prosody, and comprehension go into developing a reader's fluency (p. 445). However, Deeny says that a deeper view of accuracy is more than just those four parts. It needs to be broader rather than narrower. We need to look at fluency as a whole rather than just minute by minute.

Rasinski agrees that there are different dimensions of fluency, however it is the whole thing that creates allows a reader to be able to read fluently.

I think this is a great concept of fluency because practice and experience is what gives children fluency not the short choppy assessments.

I know in the first grade class I am in currently, I am not sure how I feel about the leveled readers because the books that are on most of the children's reading levels are not that interesting or entertaining. Instead of working on fluency, which is the point, the children are reading like robots because they are just reading the words without taking in the meaning. It is too boring and dry. The children simply hurry to read two of the leveled readers so that they are able to read a "real" book on the book shelf such as Cat in the Hat. 

Do you think it is ok to use "real" books to promote fluency instead of the leveled readers?

Here is a link to a good parent letter to give parents tips for working on fluency at home. This includes a list of high frequency words.
http://blog.maketaketeach.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Oral-Reading-Fluency-Parent.pdf