Veronica's Week 9 Post

Reading fluency can be taught in Book Club in various ways by allowing students to pick their favorite passages, quotes or paragraphs from the book they are reading and practice rereading it 3-5 times. This can improve students' reading speed, decrease the number of errors they make, allows for students to chunk words into meaningful phrases and read with more expression (175). It is also interesting to learn that researchers have found that through repeated reading, students will deepen their comprehension of the book they reread; in this case the book used in Book Club. In my field placement, the second grade students have kindergarten reading buddies which they will read to every Friday afternoon. They often choose books they have read before in their guided reading groups; this allows for an additional opportunity for students to practice words they are learning during their Language Arts instruction. Through guided reading, teachers can assess students' word identification and fluency or by asking them to think aloud and explain how they used decoding to spell a particular word.

In this chapter (Chap. 5- Literacy for the 21st Century), I also found very interesting that word walls are used not only in primary grades but in upper grades as well. This chapter states, second grade teachers often begin the year with the easier half of the high frequency words already on the word wall and they add 50 to 75 more words during the school year (158). Teachers in upper grades can create word walls of common words students need to learn as well as words that students often misspell or confuse with other words.