Submitted by Laura Wurzbacher
2nd Grade Teacher, Church Lane Elementary School
In second grade this year, we are focusing on a wide variety of skills to improve our reading fluency. Each week, we provide our students with a checklist for ELA with tasks that we work on throughout the week. One block on the checklist focuses specifically on improving our reading fluency skills. Using Vocaroo (a voice recording tech tool), our students record themselves reading their differentiated leveled texts. They then are able to copy and paste a web link that Vocaroo provides and use a BCPS One turn-in to submit their personal recording link to their teacher. Then, using a recording sheet, students listen to their recording and reflect on how they read in terms of the characteristics of fluent reading. We call this “Glows and Grows”, with glows being what the student feels that they excelled with and grows being what the student feels they can improve upon next time. Students are expected to determine whether each given characteristic was a glow or grow for them and they also explain why they rated themselves this way.
We have found that when given this opportunity to be reflective readers, our students are comfortable with being honest with themselves and work to improve their grows the next time around. Eventually, we plan to have students listen to a partner’s recording and complete a glow/grow for them. Also, having our students’ recorded readings in a turn-in format on BCPS One easily allows us as teachers to check in with our students’ reading fluency abilities in a quick and simple way. This also allows our students to be able to listen to their older recordings to hear how far they’ve come with their skills! Our reflective reading practice was modeled and demonstrated multiple times in order to explicitly provide students with our expectations for this assignment. Students love to volunteer their recordings as whole-group examples and everyone enjoys hearing their friends read by clicking on a simple web link and then providing both compliments and constructive advice for next time. This activity has been very productive and successful so far in helping our students hear and understand what they can work on to improve their reading fluency skills. As a second grade team, we look forward to developing this task further with our students!
2nd Grade Teacher, Church Lane Elementary School
In second grade this year, we are focusing on a wide variety of skills to improve our reading fluency. Each week, we provide our students with a checklist for ELA with tasks that we work on throughout the week. One block on the checklist focuses specifically on improving our reading fluency skills. Using Vocaroo (a voice recording tech tool), our students record themselves reading their differentiated leveled texts. They then are able to copy and paste a web link that Vocaroo provides and use a BCPS One turn-in to submit their personal recording link to their teacher. Then, using a recording sheet, students listen to their recording and reflect on how they read in terms of the characteristics of fluent reading. We call this “Glows and Grows”, with glows being what the student feels that they excelled with and grows being what the student feels they can improve upon next time. Students are expected to determine whether each given characteristic was a glow or grow for them and they also explain why they rated themselves this way.
We have found that when given this opportunity to be reflective readers, our students are comfortable with being honest with themselves and work to improve their grows the next time around. Eventually, we plan to have students listen to a partner’s recording and complete a glow/grow for them. Also, having our students’ recorded readings in a turn-in format on BCPS One easily allows us as teachers to check in with our students’ reading fluency abilities in a quick and simple way. This also allows our students to be able to listen to their older recordings to hear how far they’ve come with their skills! Our reflective reading practice was modeled and demonstrated multiple times in order to explicitly provide students with our expectations for this assignment. Students love to volunteer their recordings as whole-group examples and everyone enjoys hearing their friends read by clicking on a simple web link and then providing both compliments and constructive advice for next time. This activity has been very productive and successful so far in helping our students hear and understand what they can work on to improve their reading fluency skills. As a second grade team, we look forward to developing this task further with our students!
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