Multiple Voices

Activity: Multiple Voices

Purpose:  This variation of Collaborative Oral Reading helps students build their reading fluency.

Preparation Time: 15 minutes

Materials Needed:  Text where you can manipulate the font style.

Procedure:

1. Find a reading text at your students’ independent reading level.
2. Change the fonts of random sentences in the text to various font styles such as italics, bold, underlined, normal, etc.
3. Assign a text style to each of four students. For example, Student #1 reads regular font, Student #2 reads bold font, Student #3 reads italicized font, etc.
4. Have the students read the text out loud with each student reading their “part.”
5. When finished, have students change parts and read it again for extra practice or assign parts to four other students.
6. If you are unable to digitally manipulate the text, you can do it physically by using four different colored highlighters. Make sure students are able to distinguish the colors.

(Thanks to Dan Bruski and Liddy Rich who shared this at the 2022 Language and Literacy Conference.)