I am in my fourth year of homeschooling my son and learning to read has been a slow process for him.  He’s made a lot of progress recently, but the one remaining obstacle that I see is for him to achieve enough fluency to feel confident reading in public.  In co-op, Sunday school or other activities, he avoids reading.  He confided in me recently that he doesn’t want to read in front of his peers because he still needs to sound some of the words out.  Most of the children that he encounters around his age don’t have to do that.

As a result, I decided that helping him to be a fluent reader needs to be our top priority right now.  I don’t want him to miss out on participating in activities that he enjoys.

We’ve often used the McGuffey’s Readers for oral reading practice, and years ago, I read on another mom’s blog that she had her children read the same lesson from a McGuffey’s Reader for five days in a row.  At the time, I was confused as to why she did that, as the lessons in the early readers are short and sweet.  As I searched for information on improving fluency, though, I discovered why – Guided Repeated Reading.  While our phonics curriculum had new passages to be read by my son each day, Guided Repeated Reading has the child read the same passage over and over until they can read it without hesitation, even if it does take five days.  The steps that we have been following are:

• Practice reading for 30 minutes per day
• Have the child read the same passage at least 4 times in a row
  • Supervise and make gentle corrections when needed
• Read the passage aloud for the child at least twice to model fluent reading for them

One piece of advice that I’ve read is to model the passage at the outset of the lesson rather than having them sound it out first.  The idea is that having familiarity with it removes any anxiety that your child may have about approaching new text.  I see value in that idea, but my child is used to doing memory work (such as poems and Bible verses) and I notice that if I read through the passage for him first, he appears to be reciting portions back to me from memory, which isn’t reading.  For that reason, I have been having him sound everything out initially and then modeling it for him after he has gotten through the whole thing once on his own.

Within 3 to 6 months of following this protocol, your child’s reading is supposed to greatly improve.  We’ve been using this method for about six weeks and I can see evidence that it is working.  I’ve noticed a few improvements in particular:

1. When he encounters a word that he has mastered in a passage that we’ve previously worked on, he often remembers the word on sight now, rather than having to sound it out as though he is seeing it for the first time.
2. If we return to a passage that we’ve already done and moved on from, he can still read it easily.
3. He’s becoming braver about attempting to read unfamiliar words in other situations.

Over the course of time that we’ve been doing this, he has gone from needing about three days on a new passage to being able to master it almost completely in one sitting.

If reading fluently is a struggle for your child, you may want to consider using Guided Repeated Reading as a tool to help them.