Fluency

At Headlands we work hard to ensure that children develop fluency in reading. Fluency consists of three aspects; 

ACCURACY - accurate reading of sounds, words, phrases and sentences.

AUTOMATCITY - automatic recognition of sounds, words, phrases which builds confidence reading at length.

PROSODY - the patterns of language, the stress or meaning we illicit from reading.

All children in school develop fluency and focus on this in the Autumn term. In some classes, more time will be spent learning the reading process than in others depending on the position of the learners.

Our school model for Fluency follows an agreed structure in all year groups where children have moved on from phonics.

Structure of a Daily Comprehension Lesson - Year 2 / KS2  (when classes have completed Little Wandle)

Warm up

• Activating schema through images
• Pre-teaching vocabulary alongside images
• Asking challenging questions related to the ‘bigger picture’ linked to the text’s themes for that day

Read the text

• The teacher normally begins reading the text
• At a certain point, pupils are normally given opportunity to choral or paired read
• The teacher will finish off reading the rest of the text
• This may change depending on the lesson and the length of the extract

Respond to the text

• The reading domain skill/s is the focus for the rest of the lesson through paired and independent exploration
• There is usually one independent activity where pupils complete an activity based on the reading skill

Exam rubric question

• There is one question at the end of the lesson that looks exactly like a SATs question (this is used for every year group)
• The teacher will often model reading the question to the class
• The teacher will often guide the class through how to find the evidence in order to answer the question
• Pupils will then – using the collated information – answer the exam rubric question independently
• The level of scaffolding and modelling from the teacher depends on the reading skill – for example, if the focus is a 3-mark inference question, the scaffolding will be greater as opposed to a retrieval question which may only have one clear answer