How to Teach Fluency Strategies

Has your little reader begun to read books but their reading is so choppy and difficult to listen to? Well, then it’s time to focus on how they read the words. Another area of reading to focus on as your little one begins to read easy reader books are fluency strategies. Fluency pairs with accuracy to help your little one read independently and understand what they are reading. These reading strategies will encourage your little reader to focus on their fluency, which will help you to enjoy listening to their little voice reading more.

What is Fluency?

Fluency is the ability to read accurately, smoothly and with expression. Listening to a fluent reader is easier and more interesting. Fluency will help your child to read the words they they do know more automatically. It will also assist your reader with recognizing the pattern and using the sentence structure when reading.

Fluency not only helps to build your little ones confidence with reading, but will help you enjoy listening to them read too! Many times our children can read words easily but struggle to read them together in a sentence with ease. There are a few great strategies to teach to encourage your little one to read with more fluency.

Fluency Strategies

We pair these strategies with silly names and animals in the hopes that children will remember them and use the strategies while reading. Plus we have a stuffed animal for each strategy that our little one can snuggle when working on a specific strategy. It’s a good reminder for them of what strategy they are working on when reading too!

I learned many of these throughout my years teaching and specifically working with children on reading. Plus so many teachers use them in their classrooms. Gail Boushey and Allison Behne have a wonderful book featuring many of these strategies, The CAFE book. While this was not my first exposure to these strategies, it was the first time I saw them together in this way.

As you read to your child, practice reading fluently and practice reading much more choppy too. Let them hear the difference and decide which way they enjoy listening to a book more. I’ve even gone so far as to obtain two copies of the same book, wrap each cover, and read the first book very choppy (without fluency). Then read the second book with fluency and voices.

Even though it is the same book, your children may not notice because of the difference in how you read. And mine have always preferred the more fluent reading of the book. It’s always a surprise when we unwrap the covers and learn it was my reading fluency and not the book which made reading more enjoyable.

Fluency Strategy Use

You have a choice to use these strategies in isolation or use multiple strategies together. When we first begin reading, our readers mostly use one strategy at a time. However, most fluent readers will use a combination of these strategies without even realizing what they are doing. The strategies come so naturally, that fluent readers use them automatically without thought. For our younger readers, we need to break down the task of reading. Just like you need to teach your child the steps for getting dressed to play in the snow, you need to show your child the strategies for reading new words.

Scoop the Pelican

Help your little one to read with pacing. Teach them to scoop up 2 – 3 words and read those words quickly and smoothly together. Instead of reading word by word, they read 2 – 3 words together or even a sentence together, depending on length. Also, be sure to practice the speed of their reading (rate). They should read how they talk not too quickly or too slowly.

For this strategy, we love to let our young child read all the words on a page. Then go back and reread two words together at a time. Sometimes reading three words as a scoop makes more sense especially if the story using small article words, prepositions, or adjectives like a, the, big, little, in, and on. You can model this for your child in the beginning and allow your child to try this more independently by the end of the book. Be sure to ask your child to repeat or reread the sentence after you.

This strategy is where our stuffed pelican comes to play. Our children love to move the pelican around while reading. We also add the motion of scooping with our hands to remind the reader to scoop 2 or 3 words together. When our child gets stuck, we prompt them with the hand gesture or the stuffed animal as a gentle reminder of this strategy.

Silly Seal

Encourage your little one to read with expression. Try out different voices for each character, practice pausing at the periods, raising your pitch for a question, and raising pitch and volume for an exclamation point. So much can go into silly seal and it’s best to be extra silly with this one to really emphasize reading with expression and rate of reading.

We absolutely love adding silly voices into our stories. For example, silly voices can be low voices, high voices, squeaky voices, robot voices, etc. A whisper phone can help your child to hear their own reading to decide if they need more practice. These are great for listening to their expression but also to hear the speed of their reading as well. These can be purchased as a whisper phone or made with PVC pipe.

Pausing at Periods, Oh My!

Pausing at the periods can be a rather tricky skill for your reader, especially when sentences grow in length and sentences on a page increase. Children quickly notice that all sentences end on the same line and there is only one sentence per page. This leads to natural pausing. As your child begins to read longer sentences, they may flow over to the next line. In addition, books begin to have more than one sentence on a page.

To encourage your little one to pause at the periods, we find it best to use print out books or make a copy of a book. Hand your reader a highlighter and let them find and mark each period. We love to use our little ones favorite color. If you really cannot get a book to mark in, that’s okay too. We just use some colored highlighter tape or post-it note flags. These let you mark right in the book without damaging the pages.

Our faithful stuffed seal works well here. The sillier your seal, the better. We have found our children switching the seal from hand to hand as they read. We also add the motion of punching the periods. When our child gets stuck, we prompt them with the hand gesture or the stuffed animal as a gentle reminder of this strategy.

Repeat Rabbit

Encourage your little one to practice by rereading the story or sentence. As they read aloud, they may read the first time for accuracy. Then read the sentence again to read for fluency. The more times a sentence is read, the better your child will be at reading the story with fluency and understanding. This can be a difficult strategy for children because they often do not want to read a sentence multiple times. For them, they read it and now they are done. We need to help them see that by reading more than once, we become better readers.

Many times we will do a cold read (read it the first time) and a hot read (practice the story and read aloud a second time). Try recording the children read both the cold and hot read. The children almost always think the hot read sounds better. A great way to help your child want to reread books is to ask them to read it to you to practice, then record it for their teacher or even video call a family member to read to.

Our trusty rabbit helps us out with this strategy. While our children never particularly enjoyed repeat rabbit because they dislike rereading, they did love to snuggle with him. We also made the rabbit a little bigger since he’s such a tough strategy for kids to want to try. We also add the motion of racing back to show we need to read the page again. When our child gets stuck, we prompt them with the hand gesture or the stuffed animal as a gentle reminder of this strategy.

Final Thoughts on Fluency Strategies

I teach my children these four different fluency strategies. We call them smooth reading strategies. As they read, I encourage them to talk about how they are reading and notice where they need more support or where their understanding is breaking down. If they are unable to spot their own needs, I will read the sentences back how they read them and ask them what I need to work on. Usually they can tell me where I need help.

However, if they struggle with picking the strategy to work on, I will offer some guidance such as, “I noticed that your sentences blend together. What strategy could we use to help us remember to pause at the periods?” or “You are doing a great job of reading all the words, but I wonder if there is a way to read the whole sentence. What do you think could help us to scoop up a few words to read together?” The more ownership your give them, the better!

The two best ways to help your child become more fluent when they read is to listen to fluent readers and to reread the sentences or stories aloud. The more they practice reading, the more fluent they will become with a specific story. The more they listen to fluent readers, the more they will hear what it means to be fluent, hear different voices, and hear how readers scoop words together when they read.

A Fluency Reading Challenge

It’s hard not to feel silly when we add expression and voices into our reading, but we encourage you to give it a try. You may just see how much your child loves it! And you definitely don’t need to be an expert for your audience. Your children will love your high voice or low voice. You can even encourage them to repeat the character’s words for you using a special character voice. And if nothing else, try a whisper voice to pull your child’s attention in while you read.

Don’t miss the next post in the series detailing comprehension strategies and how to use them. These strategies can be used with any age readers and will grow with your child. If you found these strategies helpful, leave us a comment and let us know. We would love it if you would subscribe to our newsletter for more helpful tips and tricks as well a freebie from time to time.

Hi, I’m Nicole.

Here at Creatingbutterflies we provide families with practical solutions to real life problems for everything parenting, scouting, dual language, and enjoying time outdoors. We are a family of 6 with 4 wonderful becoming bilingual children who loves scouting, camping, and hiking with their family. Mom is an educator and dad is a firefighter/paramedic.