Reading Fluency Practice: Modelled Reading

Purpose: Developing piano players listen to skilled piano players. Developing football players watch skilled football players. Developing readers need an opportunity to hear skilled readers.  Modelled reading gives students a chance to hear fluent reading and helps them understand the components of fluent reading.

Prep Time: 5-15 minutes

Prep: Find and make copies of a reading passage. If the students are going to be following along, choose a passage that is slightly more difficult than they could read independently. If the students are simply going to listen to you read, choose reading material that matches your students’ interests and goals.

Procedure:

1. Pass out copies of the reading passage

2. Explain that being able to read fluently is important because it leads to greater comprehension. Explain that you are going to model what fluent readers do when they read. Encourage them to pay attention to what you do as you read out loud.

3. Read aloud to the students. They may choose to follow along or just listen to you.

4. About halfway through the passage, stop and ask students what they observed you doing.

Important points to highlight include: 

• reading at an appropriate rate (not too fast or too slow)
• chunking words together into phrases
• paying attention to the punctuation
• reading with expression

5. After bringing up these points, ask the students to pay attention to how you do these things as you read through the rest of the passage.

6. Read the remainder of the passage out loud. Ask for any additional observations.

Note: If working with English Language Learners, you may decide to simply model reading the passage aloud without the discussion of fluency components.