by Thomas Kling

Created on: November 22, 2008   Last Updated: February 03, 2009

My wife and I had supplied our kids with lots of books starting when they were real young, and we read to them often. We had been good reading role models-we always had a book, magazine, or newspaper in our hands at some point during the day. This made it more shocking when my oldest son got to first grade and he needed to see a reading specialist at school because his teacher was concerned about his reading ability.

I had read that reading aloud to children can have profound effects on their reading ability. So, reading at night before bed became a sacred ritual rather than an occasional treat. He and I started with smaller "chunky" books, ones with very repetitive and exciting patterns in them. Favorites included The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, by Eric Carle, The Going To Bed Book and Snoozers, by Sandra Boynton, and several Doctor Seuss titles. Part of the fun was getting carried away and over-emphasizing the rhythm of the words, but I'm a believer that doing that really helped lead him to better comprehension.

He loved these books and we read them over and over andsigh over again. Very soon, he was "reading" by repeating the words that he remembered went with each page. He started recognizing repetitive sight words on each page. He quickly became interested in pointing to which word he was on as he was reciting from memory. Because of our over-exaggerated reading style, he was fast to understand that sentences with exclamation points and question marks sounded different than regular sentences with periods. He looked for them before he started a sentence so he knew how to say the sentence. It was the beginning of reading whole sentences at a time rather than reading one word at a time.

When he and I talked about the stories we read, he remembered details very well because of the fluency. He made the connection that people don't sound like robots when they speak naturally. Even once he was really reading instead of repeating, if he had to stop to use a strategy on an unfamiliar word, I had trained him to go back to the beginning and reread the sentence from the start without the pause for the unfamiliar word.

An important component of the read aloud is that he saw the words as I was reading them. Even before he was reading on his own, he would ask me to point to a certain word I read so that he could see what it looked like. Once he knew how letters were supposed to sound, he was surprised by words like "laugh" because it didn't have any f's. Sometimes the irregular words stuck in his memory better than some easier ones he could decode on his own, and he learned new words that had the same pattern. The more words he remembered by sight, the more fluently he read. The more fluently he read, the more he understood what he read.

Fluency is an essential part of learning any skill. Until we become smoother at it, we can never begin to master it. While I didn't put an extraordinary amount of time into what I did with my son, no teacher has the time with 20 or more students in her class. However, even if a child does not have that advantage coming to school, fluency training is one tool that teachers should have in their box to help children learn to become better readers.

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