What is fluency passage practice? Practicing with fluency passages is an important part of helping your child improve with their ability to read fluently. If your child makes many errors while reading or the reading does not sound like a spoken conversation, he or she needs to practice reading fluency. Early readers spend a great deal of mental energy sounding out (decoding) the words on the page. Their reading often times sound robotic-not natural or fluent. As a child learns the phonetic rules and can apply them with ease, along with having automatic recall of all sight words, reading begins to sound more like fluent reading.
How to test your child’s reading fluency
Measuring fluency w.p.m. (words per minute)
- You will need to print out 2 copies of each passage (one for your child and one for the parent). Set a timer for one-minute.
- Mark through any words read incorrectly or skipped with a slash mark
- Place a bracket around the last word read within the one-minute time-frame. Count the number of words read.
- Determine how many words your child is able to read in one-minute by subtracting any words that are read incorrectly or skipped.
- Beginning of the year- By fourth-grade your child should be reading a minimum of 93 w.p.m.
- Mid-year- Students progress to a reading rate of 105 w.p.m.
- End of 4th grade- Your child should be reading at least 118 w.p.m.
