Skip to content Reading fluency is one of the later skills that children acquire in their journey to learning to read but is just as essential to future literacy studies. Before a child acquires fluency, they must learn the alphabet, sight words, decoding tactics, and phonemic awareness. Essential Skills online reading programs for kindergarten offer ample practice with these skills in an engaging and appealing format that will encourage kids to learn .
As students proceed with these lessons, they will develop a strong foundation for next steps. With the acquisition of early reading skills, teachers can begin to incorporate lessons and activities that will facilitate fluency. Reading fluency can most easily be heard, and includes timing, intonation, expression, and accuracy.
Online reading programs for kindergarten by Essential Skills are excellent tools to access and record students’ accuracy and speed, giving children instant feedback to encourage correct responses and avoid the repetition of errors.
Repeated reading, when students read and then re-read a passage has been proven to improve momentum, precision, and word recognition.A follow up in-class activity would be to have students read the same passage orally to the teacher, giving the child feedback and the teacher face-to-face insight on progress or areas of need.
Choral reading has long been used as a tool to improve reading fluency. In the classic model the teacher reads aloud from a displayed text, altering pace and pointing to words being read as children follow along orally.This method may have the drawback of a “sing-song” vocalization style. Its main benefit is that it gives the teacher an opportunity to break to discuss ideas or individual words. Choral reading works best when used with readers at similar levels of development.
Cloze reading is a method that avoids the discomfort many children feel when having to read aloud. In Cloze reading most of the text is read by the teacher with key words supplied by the students. Every story in Essential Skills Reading Comprehension online learning software for kindergarten is accompanied by Cloze activities to help children practice sight words and decoding while learning to use context to choose correct words.
Readers’ Theater is another fun classroom activity that emphasizes timing and expression while reading familiar passages. This is a great way to develop fluency in early readers. A quick Google search for “readers’ theater” will give you plenty of ideas to work with.Partner reading is another classroom activity that can be readily blended with reading programs for kindergarten. When partners have similar reading abilities and interest, they can choose from a wide variety of colorful, engaging stories to read to one another.
Spending time in this activity will often be enjoyable and using online reading programs for kindergarten from Essential Skills will ensure that children are acquiring the reading fluency practice, help, and encouragement they need to become successful, confident readers.