How do you get your students to read fluently without practice? Sometimes students get frustrated reading things over and over but what if they had a purpose for practicing?
Since it is so close to Halloween we used the book You Read to me and I’ll Read to You Very Short Scary Tales to read together. (There are other ones with different topics that are very fun if you have never heard of them before.) One student reads the pink words, the other reads the blue words, and they read the orange words together. We had fun this week practicing fluency and phrasing with the short stories in this book. I took a picture of a page that students picked to read.
They picked a partner and put the photo into the Educreations app and then they practiced lots of times before they made the final recording on Educreations. If you would like to listen to some of our recordings click below to hear them.
Educreations App is a free interactive whiteboard app that can be used for all sorts of things. We have been using this app in place of our whiteboards and markers all year so the students are really familiar with it. We have not done any recording on it yet. It worked nicely to record their reading and then you as the teacher can store the videos in your own account online so you can have them in one place and easily access them. I want to have my students use this app to explain more learning processes later, but this is a fun way to get them used to recording clearly and loudly, and then transition into explaining learning later. The students loved sharing their stories with the class after recording which was a purpose for practicing phrasing and fluency.
Hope you enjoyed some of our Spooky Tales and didn’t get to scared!
