Practice Makes Almost Perfect

Objective:  Students will increase reading fluency through using their voices to express feeling while reading.

We've been spending lots of time recording our reading aloud, listening, and critiquing.  The last two times students came to the library they read Reading Fluency Practices from their ELL textbooks.  These were readings they were familiar with already.  The first week two students shared iPads and used a form to critique their own reading and their partners' reading.  With some good feedback from their ELL teacher, Jennelle, I changed the written response form so that students would be required to use complete sentences when they critiqued their own reading aloud.  I also had students working alone with their own iPad.  This made a big difference in the quality of their reading and written work.  Since they're saving all their recordings in Dropbox, I can listen to them from home.  They each have their own folder in the same account, and we've been able to save many weeks of recordings and compare their reading fluency now with how they did in the beginning.  I'm really beginning to hear much improvement.  I was hoping the students would be taking their standardized reading test this week, but it's been moved to March, so I won't know till then if what we've been doing translates into better reading scores for the students. I certainly hope so.