Seminar 6- Amy Benson

After reading Mosiac of Thought I have a new idea about how reading comprehension and fluency are related. I think it is possible for these things to be totally connected, and for these things to be disconnected. I’ve heard before that students can be reading with prosody and fluency and not comprehending much of what they are reading. I’ve seen this happen in my classroom. Sometimes students hear about the new “cool” books and want so badly to read them that they will sit there and read the entire book without really understanding the story. I’ve also read and heard from my mentor teacher that students improve their reading level the most through reading books that are “just right” for them. Although that is a little beside the point, I thought it was interesting.

On the other hand, I feel like it is possible to completely comprehend what you are reading and still not be able to read it aloud fluently. I think that one of the best ways students learn fluency is by hearing teachers read. This gives students an idea of how to read with expression. Students learn a lot through the power of modeling and I don’t think that reading comprehension and fluency should be any different.

There was one part of the reading that really stuck out to me. There was a paragraph that talked about how important it is for teachers to do read alouds simply for enjoyment. It was saying that sometimes we get so overwhelmed with fitting everything in and teaching every comprehension strategy that we forget about why we want to read books in the first place. Even at a 3/4 level students still LOVE hearing the teacher read books to them. Not forgetting the pleasure of reading is huge.

I’m not sure yet what strategies are used to assess fluency in my classroom. Other than observing some ELL tests from a distance, I haven’t seen any students reading aloud to a teacher. This could be because we are still on a crazy schedule due to the MEAP or it could be because we don’t do it (which I doubt). We have spent significant time talking about visualization, making connections, predictions and retells, but not a lot specifically about fluency. I tend not to think about fluency when I think about reading comprehension strategies. This is probably something I should look into.