Developing fluency and comprehension
Once children can decode confidently, their reading lessons focus on developing reading fluency and comprehension. Reading comprehension is the ability to read a text, process it and understand its meaning. It relies on two, interconnected abilities: word reading (being able to decode the symbols on the page) and language comprehension (being able to understand the meaning of the words and sentences).
Over a week, children in year 3 to 6 take part in two fluency lessons and two comprehension-based lessons all focused around the same text. Year 2 follow a similar model within one weekly lesson. All reading lessons start with a focus on vocabulary ‘Powerful word of the day’ where a key word from the weekly text is explored in detail. The weekly texts used are a mix of fiction, non-fiction and poetry.
| Monday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Powerful word of the day Fluency |
Powerful word of the day Fluency |
Powerful word of the day Comprehension |
Powerful word of the day Comprehension |
| The focus on fluency allows for the children to become confident in reading the text with ease. | Reading comprehension is the ability to read a text, process it and understand its meaning. | ||
Strategies used to develop fluency:
Paired Reading
|
Children develop their fluency by taking it in turns to read aloud to each other. They discuss where expression and intonation should be used and challenge each other to improve as the session goes on. |
ECHO reading
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Echo reading is a strategy to help children develop expressive, fluent reading. In echo reading, the adult or confident reader reads a short segment of text, sometimes a sentence or short paragraph, and children repeat it back. |
Text Marking
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Children read through a text and write symbols on their copy identifying where characters speak and the key punctuation marks in order to aid their comprehension through meaningful expression. |
Performance reading
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Children work together to plan how to read aloud a passage of a text, script or poem to an audience with expression, fluency and meaning. |
Focus areas used to develop comprehension:
- Retrieval
- Inference
- Words in context
- Summarising
- Predication
- Links between texts
- Word choice
- Comparisons
- Multiple choice
- Ordering
- Find and copy
- Short response
- Open-ended response