Components of 3rd Grade Reading: Fluency

Third grade reading fluency is an essential part of teaching third grade reading! These simple reading fluency strategies will help your kiddos gain fluency skills quick and easily!

In this series, I am covering the different elements of third grade reading! Head here to check out more from this series! 

Reading Fluency Strategies for Third Grade

By the time students hit third grade, many of them are able to read, but not all of them are able to read accurately or quickly. Reading fluency is an essential skill in third grade, but can also be added in with many other parts of your instruction. Quick practice, repeated reading, and daily discussion can lead to better reading fluency without the need to have a whole separate time in your schedule focused on it. 

Comprehension can be a Reading Fluency Strategy  

Each and everyday you are working with reading comprehension, fluency can be added right alongside of that! 

Doing a paragraph of the day each day can help your kids improve their comprehension, but also their fluency. 

Easy reading fluency strategies include…

• Read the passage to your students and then have them read it again to themselves. During this time, you would find those targeted students and work on a skill like accuracy, rate, punctuation, etc. 
• Read the passage all together. 
• Have them read it to themselves, then all together, and then with a partner. 
• When students are reading aloud, you can be working with one or two individual students and coaching them through fluency skills.
• Have them read the passage to themselves and record it on a recording device. Then, have them listen to themselves and find one area to improve. 

Want to grab a few paragraphs for free!? Keep reading! These are easy paragraphs that would take 10 minutes in the classroom, but provide you with reading fluency practice and reading comprehension practice.

Or grab the whole year here!

Homework Add On

STAR homework is a powerful way to give students choice and independence when it comes to homework! You can read more about it here!

But with any homework model, you can add in fluency practice. Once a month I add a fluency passage to their STAR homework packet. Then, they are told to read the passage every day to a different family member or friend. At the end of the week, they read it to me. This is a simple way to add in repeated readings! 

Reading Novels

Having students read short novels is a great way to work on reading fluency skills and strategies!

Do you have a silent reading time in your day?! If not, you should! 

During that time, find one or two targeted students and have them read aloud a page or two to you. Have them read that page more than once and guide them through how to get a better rate, better accuracy, or better use of punctuation.

Do you do any novel studies in class?! If not, you should be, too! You can read about novel studies here! But, while doing a novel study, have the kids take the book home and reread the chapter that you read in class. This is an easy way to increase reading fluency through the reading fluency strategy of repeated reading. 

Guided Reading Fluency

With kiddos that NEED fluency help, you can start out your guided reading lesson with a quick fluency lesson. Grab two or three sentences and talk to students about the skill. Then, have them each go around reading that sentence practicing the skill. Have the other students give compliments and feedback on how the students performed on that fluency skill.

Assessment

Don’t overwork yourself on testing fluency in third grade. By third grade, most students are doing okay with fluency! I assess their fluency once a quarter as a quick check to make sure they are improving on their words per minute! Just give them a passage and have them read for one minute. Write notes about their punctuation use, rate, tone, etc. But don’t overassess them on this! You are working on it way more often than you think!

Don’t forget to grab the freebie!

Paragraph of the Day FREEBIE

Grab the free paragraphs above to have quick and easy passages that you can use for reading fluency strategies, but also comprehension!