A Fluent Wednesday WOW

Thanks for stopping by!  This is one of my all-time favorite lessons...

My reading teammate (Karen) and I decided to start 2014 off right with some concrete metacognition lessons.  And they were so so so successful!! I wasn't expecting them to go so well.  It was a huge WOW! Actually...it is my *first* post on the Literacy Land blog.  You can check it out tomorrow HERE!
This week we wanted to really illustrate how we group our words naturally when speaking and that doing this when reading allows us to read fluently.  We wanted to also explain that fluency allows your brain to think about what you are reading (metacognition).  Karen and I had it all planned out!

Then Sunday night hit and so did an idea!  The metacognition lesson was so concrete and visual, which is why it was so successful.  I wanted the fluency lesson to be just as powerful.  Here is what I came up with:
1. Read Wolf! (one of my favorite books to illustrate fluency):

2. Then we took a sentence from the book and had the students hold up each word.

I read it aloud with space between each word (very robotic).  Then our firsties read it the same way.

3. We decided that this was not fluency.  So I pushed all the students close together, leaving no space between the words.

This time I read it super fast!  Our firsties decided this was not fluency.

4.  This time we spaced the words out just a small amount.  I explained that when we speak and read we actually group our words.  This helps us so we speak and read at a correct pace.  I showed these groups with swoops (or ribbon).

We used the ribbon to help us slide our finger along the phrase, instead of pointing at each word.

5. After this demonstration, we looked at this new learning on paper.

Students came up and used the swoops to help them slide along the phrases.  We even stood up and acted out some of the phrases and swoops by moving along with the sentence.

I look forward to doing some practice with this skill in our small groups now!  And a few more fluency tricks that I have up my sleeve ;)

Can't wait to read about your WOWs!!