Take A Closer Look: November - Mrs. Russell's Room

Fluency is a passion of mine!

I love writing passages for my students!

Today, we’re going to take a peek at two of my fluency sets that get tons of use and love in my room.

Let’s take a closer look at my November Fluency for Seconds &
Bridge the Gap for Firsties {FALL EDITION}

Just a bit of background on how these came to be…

I had some students that needed second grade level passages with a bit more accountability for their thinking, so I made the second grade passages.

Then I realized that I had a group that needed a stretch, but not quite as cognitively difficult as the second grade set–so, my Bridge the Gap series was born for them!

The BTG series has 15 passages in each set. I leveled them for you so that you could offer them to your students a la carte. The Second Grade set is four different topics that are leveled. They work great in small group, or also for homework.

Now that I teach third grade, the first grade BTG set is so helpful to give me more words for students to wrestle with, but at a lower complexity level. So, when I hand out fluency, the look and feel of a third grade passage is similar to the first grade one. The reader and task demands are different.

BTG is one of my favorite sets because it’s so versatile.

So, here’s what you get in a BTG set!

There will be a page with the reading program conversions for the whole set.

Each passage is numbered. You can tally the words per minute over four days. There’s also an oral response question for each day. If you would like to differentiate further, one thing I did, particularly when I was in first…or even now when I have students who struggle to write, I allow them to just have this first sheet. They are still getting reading practice, and comprehension as well. They can choose to mark the text in whatever way suits them to recall important information.

This second page can be extension work. Students will use crayons to support the answers they gave in the text. There’s a final question that asks the students to do a bit of internet research. It’s always fun to see what they kids come up with after a search.

This last page is unnumbered and can be used for a number of different things. I primarily use this text to follow along with students who are reading to me. This is also a great option if you’d like to have a page where you are teaching kids to mark their own texts in their own way.