A Focus on Fluency: How One Teacher Incorporated Fluency With Her Reading Curriculum

Reading fluency has been identified as a key goal for the elementary school reading curriculum. Despite its theoretical importance in reading development and research that has demonstrated its effectiveness in improving reading performance, many teachers are not familiar with effective methods of instruction for reading fluency and ways for integrating reading fluency with the overall classroom reading curriculum. This article details the three‐year journey of one fourth‐grade teacher to make reading fluency an integral part of her reading curriculum. Using Readers Theatre, partner reading, writer's craft passages, and a limited focus on timed readings helped her develop a fluency curriculum that students found engaging and productive. Data from three years of implementation of the fluency curriculum indicate that students have made substantial gains in various aspects of reading development. Moreover, those gains have been greater than those found in years prior to the implementation and integration of fluency instruction with the reading curriculum.