Reading Lesson Overview

I have chosen to work with a group of three fourth grade students in my classroom on their fluency. One of the students, Adam, has worked with a reading specialist in the school because he is significantly below grade level in reading. She has determined that he has a stutter, which inhibits his ability to read with adequate speed and inflection. After discussing this situation with my MT, she revealed to me that she does not think that Adam's problem is a stutter. Instead, she thinks that he may not take a deep enough breath before reading, which makes it difficult to get through phrases of text naturally. In my work with Adam, it does sound as though his voice is not as strong as others' voices in the classroom. He has the most trouble reading aloud when he appears tired, and, along with struggling to read fluently, gets many comprehension and vocabulary review questions wrong after he completes a text.

The other two students in the group, Grace and Eli, are very quiet. They rarely contribute in a large group setting, and when they read aloud, have very little prosody. I have included them in the group with Adam because I think that they could benefit greatly from developing their fluency. It will help them become more confident readers, and working on reading text naturally will help them comprehend the texts that they read more naturally. Adam, Grace, and Eli all have similar reading levels and were all a part of the group of students that I taught my Language Arts lesson to earlier this semester.

In order to develop the fluency (accuracy, automaticity, and prosody) of these three students, I have chosen to center my mini-lessons around Reader's Theater. I think that this is an activity that will engage the students and make reading with inflection more natural. My MT has provided me with a Reader's Theater book that contains scripts appropriate for the third grade reading level. Having scripts at a lower level means that most of the vocabulary will be known to the students (increasing the likelihood of automaticity and accuracy), so they should be able to focus on the emotion and expression of reading the text. Also, having the text split into parts will help the students focus on phrasing their lines and read smoothly. I am really looking forward to working with this group of students on developing their fluency. I think that they will learn a lot and enjoy themselves in the process.