The Fluency Staircase: A Different Approach

If your students sound like robots when they read, then you’ve come to the right place! 🤖

(This blog post builds on our previous one about backwards lesson planning. If you haven't had a chance to read that post yet, you can check it out HERE!)

The "Fluency Staircase"

Have you ever tried to run up a flight of stairs taking 2 steps at a time? When you get to the top, your muscles burn and you're out of breath. On the flip-side, if you walk up a flight of stairs one step at a time, you can get to the top with relative ease. Fluency is the same. If your reader skips "fluency steps", everything will feel much more difficult and their stamina will more than likely take a hit.

Walking your students up the "fluency staircase" is going to help them become smooth and fluent readers. So what are these so-called fluency steps?!

Step 1: Sounds

The first step to helping your students become fluent readers is to have them work on fluency at the sound level. Students need to be able to see a grapheme and instantly recognize it. Notice how we said "grapheme" and not just letters. So often, rapid letter naming is practiced until all letters and sounds are mastered. Then, fluency at the sound level is abandoned. We should continue to help students build fluency with sounds even while they are learning vowel teams, r-controlled vowels, and other more complex graphemes. Here are some activities you can use to help students build sound fluency:

• Rapid naming charts
• Flashcards
• "What Says?" (You say a sound, students repeat it, you ask, "What says ___?", students respond, and then write the grapheme. You can do this with pencil and paper, using sand trays, etc.)
  
  

Step 2: Words

The next step to building fluency is at the word level. If you're using the backward lesson planning method, look at the decodable reader that you’ve selected and pick out words for your students to practice. Type these into a word list for your students to practice reading. Once they get to the decodable reader, your students will be more successful since they’ve been practicing the words they’re going to see in the story.

Here are some ways to practice fluency at the word level:

• Rapid naming charts with words
• Word lists
• Successive blending activities
• Word games
  
  

Step 3: Phrases

Working on fluency at the phrase level comes next. Reading with proper phrasing is SO important when working on prosody. Reading word by word, like a robot, will never sound fluent (unless your book has talking robots in it!)

Just as you pulled words out of the text, pull phrases out of the story your students are going to read too. You can use the following activities to then practice phrase fluency:

• Phrase scooping (our favorite!) - Model how to identify words that belong together in a phrase, draw a scoop underneath them, and read the phrase with fluency.
• Echo reading
• Phrase cards
  

Step 4: Sentences

The next step is at the sentence level. By the time you get to this step, your students should be feeling pretty good! They’ve seen the same letters, words and phrases a few times now, which will make the sentence practice smoother. Here are some activities to work on sentence-level fluency:

• Repeated reads
• Echo reading
• Partner plays/ Reader's theater

Step 5: Stories

Now that your students have practiced sounds, words, phrases, and sentences, they will be MUCH more fluent when it's time to read an entire story! 

The Resources You Need, All in ONE Membership!

We understand that purchasing resources one by one adds up fast—and as teachers, we know every dollar matters. That’s why our K-2 membership, Launching Literacy, is a smarter and more cost effective option. Our membership gives you everything you need for small group instruction—all in one place—so you can save time, money, and stress.

No more weekends wasted hunting for Science of Reading–aligned heart word resources, phonics lessons, and decodable texts. With Launching Literacy, you simply log in, choose the skill you want to teach, and instantly download detailed, ready-to-use lesson plans and activities.

In just a few clicks, your small group lessons are prepped and ready to teach—so you can spend less time planning and more time making an impact in your classroom. It’s planning made simple, effective, and affordable.

We hope that you found this blog post helpful! Whether you choose to join the membership or not, we are always here to help you in any way we can. Send us an email at: [email protected] with any questions you have!