Growing Minds Teaching Center, Inc.

Reading- Students will participate in a 1:3 pupil ratio and/or individualized instruction environment. Emphasis is focused primarily on comprehension, vocabulary, main idea, author's purpose, fluency, and chronological order. The use of interactive media is integrated as well.

We use the progress monitoring strategy in shaping fluency and guided oral reading to support our instruction.

What is "progress monitoring" in fluency?- Monitoring progress in reading fluency involves taking samples of students' reading and recording the correct words per minute. Teachers look for increases in the words read correctly per minute from test to test.This measure is highly reliable, valid, and strongly correlated with reading comprehension. Futhermore, it is highly predictive of performance on high-stakes reading tests.

What is "guided oral reading"?- Guided repeated oral reading is an instructional strategy that can help students improve a variety of reading skills, including fluency. There are a number of effective procedures that can be used in providing guided oral reading. In general, the teacher or peer reads a passage aloud,modeling fluent reading. Then the student rereads quietly, on their own, sometimes several times. The text must be on the student's independent reading level. Next, the student reads aloud again to model the fluency once heard by the teacher or peer. Program 1 Continued