"Students in classrooms that provide big blocks of time for sustained silent reading, as well as students from home environments that encourage home reading, show more gains in reading rate than students who do little reading at school or home." Page 208-209
In my field placement class, they use a computer program called Read Naturally and the have sustained silent reading. This program uses teacher modeling, repeated reading, and progress monitoring to maximize reading proficiency. The students pick a story, read the main vocabulary, make a prediction about the story, the read cold timed, then they follow along as the story is read to them, read the story out loud, and answer questions about the story.
I noticed a big difference in the students fluency in the two schools I am at this semester. At the school that uses Read Naturally, the students read smoothly and they change their voices for questions and dialogue. At the other school, I noticed that the students tend to read each word in the sentence and do not run them together to make a sentence.
This is a perfect example of what Kylene Beers says. When students have the opportunity to read and improve their fluency, it will improve.
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The key to effective SSR is to properly match reading levels of the text to reading levels of the student, while maintaining some semblance of student choice.
ReplyDeleteLearn how to match reading levels of texts to reading levels of your students without time-consuming assessments. Also, learn how much independent reading is needed to make grade to grade progress. Check out How to Choose the Right Book.