One of the biggest mistakes I made as a first grade teacher was putting the cart before the horse.

From the beginning of the year, I spent a lot of time on text-level fluency activities. Shared reading. Poetry reading. Repeated readings of familiar texts.

And some students looked fluent.

But I didn’t realize that because I hadn’t built a strong phonics foundation yet, many of them were just sounding fluent.

Underneath that smooth “reading,” many were really just reciting.

Here’s what I didn’t understand yet:

Fluency doesn’t start at the text level. It starts with automaticity at the word level.

If students are still using most of their mental energy to decode words, no amount of shared reading is going to make them truly fluent. They might sound okay in familiar texts, but the moment the text gets harder, everything falls apart.

I had it backward.

What students really needed first was lots of opportunities to practice reading words accurately.

Only then does text-level fluency instruction do what we hope it will do.

This is exactly what we dig into in my live workshop, The Fluency Formula. It's this coming Saturday!

We look at how students move from phonics to fluency, why automaticity is the missing link for so many readers, and what kinds of fluency routines support that process.

We'll also look at the specific routines to use after students have that phonics foundation.

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​Date: Saturday, March 7
​Time: 9 AM-10:30 AM Central
​Replay: Yes (one year access)
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​CLICK HERE TO REGISTER​

Anna

P.S. If you’ve ever felt unsure about when to use certain fluency activities or why fluency isn’t sticking the way you expected, this workshop will help you see the progression much more clearly.
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If you can make it live on Saturday, March 7 (9:00-10:30 AM Central), bring your questions. We’ll do a live Q&A at the end, and I’ll stay until we’ve worked through them! Register here.​