Increase Drastically Students' Fluency with These Simple Strategies

I will briefly introduce a series of simple strategies and techniques that have been proven successful in my classrooms over the last three years. Within a few months of reading instruction, these have successfully brought students from first to second-grade F&P reading levels to fifth grade and beyond. Strategies that you can implement within any reading curriculum.

It is a straightforward modus operandi that can allow struggling readers to gain up to 10 reading levels within one school year. These techniques have the potential to increase 3 to 4 years of fluency growth in one school year, empowering readers below the level of reading that they should already be meeting and allowing them to bridge the reading gaps which are holding them back. You can detect tangible results within days of beginning this platform.

These strategies are based on repetition of the text until the brain has developed the mental image of the word, allowing the student to recognize the shape of the word as a whole instead of decoding the text letter by letter.

   Repetition of text, re-reading the same text multiple times until fluency is acquired,paragraph by paragraph, and varying text types are excellent strategies that can significantly impact struggling readers. By combining fiction and non-fiction, progressively allowing the students to become fluent sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph until a certain quantity of words is memorized by the brain, the words will eventually immediately become recognized upon viewing them, and educators can expect to see results within days.

Complex vocabulary assimilation techniques must accompany this. Vocabulary should also be highlighted while working on decoding complex terms. Students will learn how to approach complicated terms and automatically acquire decoding techniques. They will learn how to recognize pronunciation patterns and stress/decode the terms correctly.

Students should first become fluent with small parts of the text, repeating it as many times as needed for fluency to be acquired. This platform can also greatly benefit students with learning disabilities that may otherwise struggle with reading skills and comprehension.

Much practice is required by the student, both at school and home, to reach these gains. Students all over the country, ready to become fluent readers, can take their education and self-esteem to the next level by simply relying on our ‘brain’s ability to immediately recognize something that has been viewed multiple times. This can represent a revolutionary solution for hundreds of thousands of struggling readers.

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