What's Working Wednesday...on Thursday

Sorry I am a day late with this one. It has been a crazy couple weeks here and I haven't had much time to get anything done. This week I want to share something that my students LOVE. It is our ten minute fluency time. I got this idea from Lisa over at Fourth and Ten, so I can't take credit, but I can tell you that the kids do enjoy it. In fact, they are upset when we don't do it. Four days a week we spend ten minutes a day working on fluency.

Each student is assigned a group based on their fluency rate. You can see the picture below that shows my schedule. Each group does one activity a day.

Fluency tub 1 contains Lisa's Fry Phrase games. My kids LOVE this game. I mean, not just during fluency time. If they ever have free time they are rushing to get this game out to play. I try to get a seasonal bag or container for the different monthly games. In February you can see, we had a pink cloth bag with X's and O's on it. In March I used a St. Patrick's day hat. The kids loved it.

Fluency tub 2 has Christina Bainbridge's Roll Read Repeat games. Again, kid tested and kid approved. They enjoy this one! I keep just one set in the tub at a time and students just pick a board to play with a partner or group of three.

Fluency tub 3 has partner poems in it. At first my kids were not a fan of this one. (The book the poems are from is shown in the image below.) But then I told them to get into it and plan a performance. And now they are enjoying it. They work on memorizing it and really getting into their acting. They LOVE to put on a performance for the class when fluency time is over.

The last thing is to meet with me. Students come with me and we do Cloze reading passages. We do these in different ways based on ability. Usually my advanced group I really let them go for it together without my help so that I can take a few minutes to monitor the other groups and make sure they are actually reading what is on the activity they are doing. Other groups that need more support we read together. Usually we look at the word choices first and discuss what they mean. Then we read. Sometimes I read and then they repeat and then I let them do it alone. It just depends on the group and story. My kids enjoy this because they get to use the elusive dry erase markers. OOOOH (The book these passages come from is in the picture above with the poetry book.)

Overall my kids really enjoy this. We have only been doing it since mid February but I really think that if done from the start of the year, it would truly help kids with their fluency. And it is only 10 minutes a day. We do it after lunch and it helps to get them back into classroom mode and out of cafeteria chaos mode.

So what is working for you? Link up with a post or a tip for other teachers. And if you do, don't forget to enter the rafflecopter below!

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