Chapter 10: Fluency and Automaticity

Once again, this chapter has made me grateful to be blessed with the the ability to read well and want to help those that cannot. It reiterated the need for reading in the classroom. I want to set time apart in my classroom each day for this and hope that I can remember to do this. Two of the methods that Beers talked about I really liked. The first one is to improve knowledge of high-frequency words and sight words. The index card idea was great. That way students can have individual words they can be working on depending on their reading level. If you have a very diverse classroom this is great. Students at a low reading level can use the cards for high-frequency words while those that are good at reading can use them for vocabulary words and less frequent words they find while reading.

The other suggestion that struck me as very important was that teachers should prompt and not correct. I have always found myself not knowing what to do when a student doesn't know a word and struggles with it. I always correct. Many times I have not even had that student say the word after I correct them; they just go on with the rest of the sentence. I see now how important it is not to do this. We need to help our students develop the skills to understand these words without us giving them the answers.