Reading fluency is the ability to read material accurately and quickly which aids in reading comprehension. A reader must learn to recognize words automatically. Grouping words together allows the reader to gain meaning from the text. Fluent readers can read out loud with little effort and a lot of expression.

If your child has not gained fluency, she will read slowly with a choppy and plodding manner. You will find that she will have trouble understanding what she has read because choppy reading makes it difficult to get a “movie” going in her head. There are several exercises you can do at home to help your child increase his reading fluency.

Follow up:

You can work with your child by doing repeated and monitored oral reading. Read a passage to her while she follows along while you read. Then, have her read it back to you several times mimicking your phrase chunking and expression. The big thing to remember is to exaggerate the word chunking you do naturally so she can see and hear the way you group phrases. “Chunking” is the way you naturally read words together in short phrases so that the text makes sense. For example, read this sentence from The Declaration of Independence. To make sense of this sentence while reading, note that you automatically read the words in phrases to help make sense of the passage—

“We hold / these truths / to be self-evident, / that all men / are created equal, / that they are endowed / by their Creator / with certain / unalienable Rights, / that among these / are Life, / Liberty / and / the pursuit of Happiness.”

A reader that has not gained reading fluency will read individual words rather than phrases or phrase words together that are not meant to be chunked as a phrase making it difficult to understand the meaning of the sentence……….

“We / hold these / truths to / be self / -evident, that / all / men are / created equal, that / they are / endowed / by their / Creator with / certain unalienable / Rights, that among / these are / Life, Liberty and / the / pursuit of / Happiness.”

As you read together with your child, point out punctuation in the sentence and how that helps you to know where to pause or stop to breathe as well as how to put inflection in your voice using exclamation and question marks as cues. Review prepositions with your child. Being able to identify a prepositional phrase will greatly increase their ability to see some grammatical clues to chunking phrases in a sentence.

Be sure to talk about getting a “movie” going in her head as she reads so that she can easily see the action, feel the emotions the text evokes and aid in overall comprehension.

Getting recorded books that she can listen to as she follows along with the book will also help practice fluency skills. Ask her to read aloud with the recorded book to get more practice.

Encourage her to read everything out loud to herself so the ears and eyes are both involved in the reading process--books, math problems, instructions, everything. Using a finger to follow along the text will get the hands involved in the reading process as well.

Encourage her to write new vocabulary on an index card using colors to highlight letters or groups of letters that make the word difficult to remember or spell correctly (silent "e" or vowel combinations that are odd like "au" and "aw.") Have her hold the card up so that she must move her eyes up and right to see the card (no head tilting) and practice saying the word aloud as she reads it several times. Tell her to then move the card so she doesn't see it and, with eyes looking up and right, try to "see" the same word in her head. This helps to move the new vocabulary into her long term memory area in the left side of the brain. This may help with word recognition while she is reading. Word recognition makes reading more automatic and easier to "chunk" when she sees it in a new reading passage.

To practice fluency while reading, have her pick books that are a bit below her reading level so that she doesn't struggle with new vocabulary, but can practice fluency alone.

If you don't have family reading time, pick a book the whole family would enjoy hearing and spend some time each week reading it to each other.

Finding a tutor who will have additional exercises to assist with reading fluency will also help.