Strive to Read 25 Books This Year! |
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Reading Fluency Focus At CVE 2007-08
This year in our School Improvement Plan, we continue working on the skill of improved reading fluency as a goal for all of our students. The plan calls for monitoring and improving the rate and word accuracy of students while reading.
Fluency is what students have achieved when they can read aloud with accuracy, quickness, expression, understanding and pleasure. Their reading sounds natural as if they are speaking. Fluency is made up of four important components: accuracy, expression, intonation, and pace.
Fluency is important because it frees students to concentrate on meaning and the understanding of what they read. When they are not spending so much time on the word recognition they can focus on making connections to the ideas in the text and their life experiences.
This school year, CVE has the programs below to help students achieve improved reading fluency.
Baltimore County Reading Goal: Students reading a minimum of 25 books
All CVE students will be teaming up with their classmates to challenge each other to reach the goal of reading a minimum of 25 books this school year. We are counting every book they read - books from the public library, school libraries, and their personal collections. They include books brought home to practice from their Open Court, Fluency Formula or Houghton Mifflin classroom reading programs. They include books read for Book-Munchers, Pizza Hut Book-It Program, Grade 5 Book Bucks, Black-eyed Susan Book Club, the Reach for the Stars Read-a-thon, and our Read to Feed effort in the third quarter of the school year. Parents, be sure that you sign your name on your child's book log that lists all the books read. You might want to set goals for the total # of books read by a certain date to help your child reach 25 by the end of the year.
Fluency Formula Program
Selected students in grades 2 – 5 will also have an opportunity to participate in a fluency program called Fluency Formula that will monitor student fluency progress in Words per Minute (WPM) in August, January, and June. If your child is included in this program, it is important for you to take approximately 5 – 10 minutes each night to do the repeated readings of the given selection that will change once a week. The children will be graphing their progress so we will be covering some very practical math skills at the same time!
Whatever you do, just keep reading to and with your child. The children need to hear you model good reading. Also, listen to them read to you. The more they read, the more fluent they become. The more fluent they become, the more they can concentrate on the meaning of what they are reading. For after all, getting meaning and learning from what they read is really the whole purpose of us teaching them to read. Also, see the statistics below that show how the amount of independent reading benefits students’ achievement on standardized tests.
Variation in Amount of Independent Reading
Test %ile Minutes of Reading Words Read
per year per day
98 4,358,000 65
90 1,823,000 21.1
80 1,146,000 14.2
70 622,000 9.6
50 282,000 4.6
20 21,000 0.07
Just look at what a little more than 20 minutes of reading could do for your child’s achievement scores.
Volunteer Opportunity
If you have an hour a week and can spend some time reading with individual students to help them increase their reading fluency this school year, please contact Mrs. Stevens, CVE’s reading specialist at cstevens@bcps.com. to volunteer.
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Black-Eyed Susan Book Club
Grade 5 students are offered an opportunity to participate in a book club reading six of the nominated books and voting on their favorite book for the Black-Eyed Susan Book Award. This group, pictured, was made up of Allison, Alleysia, Kelsey, Monica, Monique, and Catie. They enjoyed all of our titles, but voted for COPPER as their favorite. Our new group of fifth graders will be starting their club in October. |
White Star: A Dog on the Titanic |
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Other Literary Events
SEPTEMBER - Students will begin logging their books read for this school year
- Some students will begin participating in Fluency Formula, a program specifically used to help students improve their reading fluency.
OCTOBER - Pizza Hut Reading Incentive Program begins. It runs October through March.
NOVEMBER 9-19 - CVE will celebrate National Children's Book Week with Reach for the Stars Read-a-thon - Goal: 150 minutes
NOVEMBER 21-Fifth graders will present their Wax Museum featuring the biographical characters that they have picked for their book projects.
OCTOBER-DECEMBER-Young Author's Contest
JANUARY/FEBRUARY/March -Read-to-Feed Read-a-thon to support families in undeveloped countries
MARCH 2 - Dr. Seuss' Birthday -guest readers
APRIL 24 - Author visit - Jerdine Nolen
JUNE - Classes celebrate reaching goal of reading 25 books
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