As a first grade teacher, we are constantly assessing non-sense word fluency. It is tough! I even drew up my own slides and implemented them within my own class, as seen in the video. This proved to be effective while my students were learning to read, and really allowed them to excel during their fluency testing. The problem I found, was that this one-on-one instruction was very time consuming and took up a lot of instructional time. I decided to implement the non-sense word slides within a group setting. My students would work with partners, and they would draw a non-sense word from the bucket and practice reading, segmenting and blending the word with their partner. Although, it allowed my students to be fluent in reading, they seemed to really struggle with the meaning behind reading. I found myself going into an overload mode to make sure my students were not only fluent readers, but that they were also meeting standards for comprehension. This goes back to discussing the individual letters that allow a reader to process the words on a page. Non-sense words are just an arrangement of letters on a page. In order for the reader to gain meaning from the text they must look at the entire word, the meaning of the word, and the context it is used in.
I believe that in order to make proficient readers we must not only work on skills to improve reading fluency, but we need to surround them with a print rich environment, thus leading them to read for meaning. The text describes several strategies that have been proved effective. The text describes chunking strategies, reading various contexts, and teaching them to analyze their own miscues. By introducing children to various reading contexts, they see a wide variety of multiple meaning words. This helps to expand their vocabularies, when they are able to identify their own miscues they are encouraged to read. Students feel as if they are able to take control of their reading, and they also enjoy helping their peers.
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