Books for Building Fluency with Readers

Building fluency in our readers is key! Fluency can help unlock both comprehension and enjoyment for reading. I don’t know about you, but I think those are pretty important parts of reading!

Today, I’m sharing some of my favorite texts and books for building fluency with our readers.

*This post contains affiliate links.

 

Texts and Books for Building Fluency

So what exactly makes a good text for building fluency? When I think of texts for fluency, there are three things that pop into my mind:

1. Short passages
2. Texts with lots of dialogue
3. Texts with strong emotion

 

Building Fluency with Short Passages

Why use short passages? One important trick for helping learners develop reading fluency is to ask them to re-read texts. More often than not, young and struggling readers will not have reading fluency upon the first {or even second} reading.  Shorter texts make the task of re-reading less daunting.

If you’ve seen any of my other book lists, you’ll notice that poetry makes it into many of them. Especially poetry by Shel Silverstein. Well, it’s in this list, too! I love that poetry is full of other skills, like figurative language. Plus, it’s loaded with punctuation.

Jokes also make an easy text to re-read for fluency. {My learners love reading and retelling jokes!}

 

Another idea is to pull and re-type short passages from chapter books. This may appeal to your learners who are turned off by picture books because they appear “baby-ish.” You can find chapter books I recommend in my chapter book lists for 2nd/3rd grades as well as my chapter book list for 4th/5th grades.

 

Building Fluency with Lots of Dialogue

Including texts for learners to read that include dialogue also helps learners practice fluency. This way, learners can include inflection in their voice while they are reading {and re-reading}.

Some of my favorite books for beginning readers that include dialogue include:

• Yo! Yes? {a classic book for teaching fluency – I’ve referenced this one in another fluency post},
• You Are (Not) Small,
• I Don’t Want to be a Frog,
• Duck! Rabbit!,
• and of course, the Elephant and Piggie books

Again, if you’re teaching older readers who may be put off my these books, pull shorter passages that include lots of dialogue from chapter books they are reading.

 

Building Fluency with Strong Emotion

This idea builds on the last kind of text I just mentioned. Pick passages or books that include dialogue WITH strong emotion. This helps learners “get into character” as they are reading.

Part of reading with expression is learning to read with emotion. And besides that, this can be really fun to do! Just a few picture book ideas include:

• the Pigeon books {boy, does that pigeon have some strong emotions!}
• Elephant and Piggie books,
• Goodnight Already!,
• Hooray for Hat! , and
• Jan Thomas’ books  {These are definitely favorites with my Kindergartner and 2nd grader. Her books have been read and re-read more times than I can count in my house.}

One of the things that buyers comment on the most about my Fluency Cards with Scooping Phrases is that their learners really enjoy reading the sentences with the emotion pictured.

 

There are quite a few emotions included in the pack, so have fun with it!

 

Other Favorites for Building Fluency

Reader’s Theater texts are another fantastic way to build fluency. If you perform the scripts for an audience, this gives learners an authentic reason to practice re-reading for fluency. Yes!

Amazon is full of resources for Reader’s Theater, but there are two place you can find them for FREE!

1. PBS Kids
2. Timeless Teachers Stuff {scroll down to find the links}

Another set of books that I wanted to be sure and mention are the You Read to Me, I’ll Read to You books. It’s similar to a Reader’s Theater format, but for two readers. Very cool!

 

What are your favorite texts for building fluency? I’d love to hear yours in the comments below!

 

 

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Enjoy teaching!
~Becky