Boost Reading Fluency

You’ve spent night after night for years reading bedtime stories to your child. Now they’re learning to read out aloud by themselves. When your growing reader furrows their brow with every word and stumbles through sentences, there are steps you can take to help set them up for lifelong reading success. 

Reading Fluency is the ability to read out loud accurately, at a good pace, with expression and feeling.  

“Although it’s typically measured in school when children start reading on their own, such as at the end of first grade, reading fluency is something you can start working on with them even before then,” says Helen Maniates, Ph.D., associate professor of teacher education at the University of San Francisco. “Reading fluency contributes to reading comprehension,” says Maniates. “When children read slowly, don’t pay attention to punctuation, or struggle with particular words, they lose track of the ideas in the text.”  

1. Lead by example! Show them your own fluent reading.

The more often your child hears fluent reading, the more quickly they are to pick it up. “Start by reading a paragraph or a full page from a book, and then ask your child to read it,” says Brook Sawyer, Ph.D., an associate professor focusing on language and literacy development at the College of Education at Lehigh University. “When you provide that model, it’s an opportunity for the child to get familiar with the story, understand the pacing, and then mimic you.” 

2. Teach your child how to track words.

If you’ve listened ever listened to people conversing in an unfamiliar language, you know how difficult it can be to decipher when one word ends and the next begins. Our little learners likely feel the same way when they try to follow along during story time. That’s where tracking — running your finger under each word as you read can really help. If can track while you’re reading to your child, they will learn through observation how to do the same. Ask them to track when they’re reading out loud. It will help them begin to read more fluently. 

“When kids are first learning to read, it’s really important for them to touch each word to understand the correspondence between the spoken and written language,” says Maniates. “It’s a stepping-stone strategy. Eventually, they’ll be able to tackle larger phrases without reading word by word.” To make tracking words more fun for your child, let them use a finger puppet,fake fingernails or witch fingers! Use your imagination with things you already have around the house. 

3. Try choral reading together. Choral reading simply means you read a story out loud, while having your child to read along ‘with you’ at the same pace. (Using tracking with choral reading will also cultivate fluency.) “This helps them hear, (see) and feel for themselves what fluent reading feels like, and gives them the chance to practice it themselves at your pace,” says Sawyer. It’s okay if you’re a tiny bit ahead of them — just be sure to pick a book that they can already read, (or know by heart) themselves. That way, they’re working on pacing and accuracy rather than stressing to decode new words.   

4. Try sight words. You may notice that your child struggles with certain words, also known as sight words. “These are words that are not easily decodable by sounding them out phonetically,” says Maniates. “They often overlap with high-frequency words, which are those that appear very often in children’s texts.” When your child memorizes what these words look like and can instantly recognize them, they may spend less time frustrated trying to sound them out. There are a lot of ‘sight word’ teaching tools and games available. Have fun with it – for example; make flash cards together. You write the words and let them draw an example on the card, (like ‘House’). This activity will help them commit the word to memory as well.

5. Create a friendly audience and/or fan club!  Just like us, children are more likely to stumble over words if they feel nervous or put on the spot. Like a Tea Party, it can be fun to set up an inviting stage for them and have them practice reading stories out loud to their favorite stuffed animals. Our local library has one day a week they call ‘Reading to a Dog.’  The staff provides a service dog and children rotate reading aloud to the dog, who’s in the center of the room. It is based on the primise that the dog enjoying it is the only one that matters, (objectively listening) – and dogs always love attention – what puppy doesn’t love a good story? How about recruiting your family pet to listen along. “Some kids really don’t like to read in front of other people, either because they feel shy or feel pressure around it,” says Sawyer. “Start by reading a story together, and then for extra practice, set up a pretend audience that they can read out loud for.”

Don’t worry if the process get off to a rocky start, with practice children progress into reading with more expression pretty quickly. “Reading out loud is almost like a performance, because you’re thinking about your voice, the volume, the pitch, the tone, and you might even be making facial expressions or gestures,” says Maniates. “We want kids to do this when they’re young because that’s how they’ll internalize stories – when they read silently to themselves later on.”