Reading Intervention for Fluency, Academic Vocabulary, and Nonfiction Text Structure

      This product has been a labor of love. Back in 2010, I wanted to put together a research-based set of activities for classroom teachers working with intermediate level readers. I wanted materials that would focus on academic vocabulary and nonfiction text structure, with lessons that were easy enough to add to an already full schedule and materials that were ready to be copied. Most importantly, I wanted to create something that would be inexpensive for classroom teachers. After months of work, I created this:

Reading Intervention for Fluency, Academic Vocabulary, and Nonfiction Text Structure.

     I worked this summer to freshen up the materials to make them even easier for classroom teachers, adding answer keys, PDFs, and better formatting. More than ten years after I wrote it, I'm still proud of the features!

The texts

    In this set, the texts are science-based, with topics ranging from poison ivy to bluebirds to caverns. I worked with topics that are adjacent to key science topics, often inspired by my visits to area museums, science centers, and parks. 

Academic Vocabulary

     Academic vocabulary is essential for unlocking the meanings and nuances of nonfiction texts. In certain reading series, I've noticed that the vocabulary words are jammed into texts, resulting in some odd usages and questionable sentences. Instead of doing this, I wrote the texts, and then searched them for academic words from Averil Coxhead's Academic Word List and other academic word list sources. 

     Engaging students in learning academic vocabulary is important. In my experience, building playful experiences in which students use the words to answer questions works well! I created a PowerPoint presentation for each text in which the words are introduced. These presentations include photos and questions to help students interact with the words, see them repeatedly in print, and use them in sentences. 

Fluency

     Is fluency broken? I kind of think so. I'm not sure that it has the prediction power that it once held. (Read more here.) Nevertheless, I still value time spent in helping students to read aloud with accuracy and expression. Each text in this intervention set includes a phrase-cued text for students to read and a fluency progress monitoring page.

     I love phrase-cued texts because they help students to see how sentences can be chunked for easier reading. Phrase-cued texts also support students in understanding sentence chunks for my favorite grammar activity, sentence unscrambling! 

     Fluency readings are a great way to talk one-on-one with a student and get a better idea of how they are word-solving. When I do fluency readings with students, I emphasize that the timing is just one part of the reading, and that I also want to hear what they can do with expression and word-solving. At the end of the reading, I give the student a compliment ("I notice that you took the time to figure out the word vanished.") and choose a quick teaching point to discuss with the student. Sometimes we look at the pronunciation of a word, and sometimes we focus on expression within a sentence. The next time that I work with the student, we review what we talked about previously.

    I created fluency passages for each of the texts in this intervention. Fluency passages are also a great way to involve parent volunteers or instructional assistants in your reading intervention. Most adults enjoy the opportunity to work individually with students.

Nonfiction text structure

     Many readers in grades 4-6 are still reading at the "local level"--that is, they're focusing on individual words and sentences within a passage without building a model of the passage as a whole. Understanding text structure and using graphic organizers to represent details can help students to move beyond the local level and develop a global model of the text.

     Each text in this series includes a graphic organizer to represent the big ideas and important details in the text. Students can then use these graphic organizers to help them write a summary of the passage as a whole.

Multiple choice questions

      While these were not part of the original program, I decided to add them as I was using the program with my own students. Each passage has 4-5 questions, along with an open-ended response prompt. 

Working on this intervention has been a bit of a passion project for me, and it's been gratifying to see so many positive reviews. Here's to another 10 years of academic vocabulary, fluency, and text structure!