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Cruising into Fluency with Cars

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Rationale: Students will gain fluency by decoding and crosschecking words to add them to sight vocabulary. By reading a fun Disney children’s book students will also work on their comprehension by answering questions about the material they read.

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Materials:

1. Cars Animated book

2. Copy of book for each group of 2 students

3. Word Count Sheet

4. White board + dry erase markers

5. Colorful paper for cover-up words on the board

6. Enough stopwatches for each pair

7. Lightning McQueen fluency tracker chart

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Procedures:

       1. “Okay class! It’s time to speed up our reading! BUT, the important thing about reading isn’t that you read fast, but that you read CORRECTLY. Once we can read words correctly, we can read them quickly and understand the story more easily. So today we are going to do repeated readings on a book about Lightning McQueen and his friends, we will try to read faster every time we read the book.”

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       2. “First, lets review how to tackle a word we don’t know.” Write the word “flash” on the board) “So if I don’t know this word, I could use my cover-up to cover all the letters except the ones that I am reading right now. So I recognize the a that we know makes the short /a/ sound, so I will remember that sound when I read all of the word. I will cover up all the letters accept the F and say /f/, then the L and say /f//l/. Then there’s my A for /a/, so we have /f//l//a/, then we see two more letters and we know that they are buddies, that’s right it’s the quiet shhhhhh, so let’s blend it all together! /f//l//a//sh/. That word is FLASH, say it with me class: FLASH”

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       3. Write on the board He was shiny and fast. “I am going to read this sentence and I want you all to pay attention to how I read it.” (read very slowly without fluency). “ ‘He www-aasss shhh-iii-nyyy and fff-aaa-sss-ttt’. Did you notice how I read it very slowly sound by sound? It was hard to understand what I was saying wasn’t it? This time I am going to read it again, and since I have already read it one time, I will read it more fluently. ‘He was shiny and fast’” That was a lit easier to understand right? I got better at reading the sentence because I was familiar with the words. That’s why we practice rereading sentences so we read and comprehend it better each time we read it! Then once we really know how to read it we can add expression!”

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       4. “Now I am going to ask you all to pair up in groups of two. I will give each pair a book, and we are going to first do a read along with the video that I have. The book we will read is Cars: Driving Buddies. In this story we have a car named Lightening McQueen, and he is a race car! His favorite thing to do is win races, but he never really has time for friends. Another car we will read about is Mater the tow truck, and he wants nothing more than to have a best friend. Let’s read the book to find out what happens to our two characters! Open your books to the first page, and let’s look along with our partner as the video reads the book for us!”

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       5. Pass out timers and evaluation sheets. “Wow, isn’t that a good book? Now that you have listened to the book I want you to use your stopwatch and take turns timing each other’s readings.” Provide model of how to use the timer. “After you time your partner you will fill out the evaluation form on your partner’s reading! We are going to read the story 3 times each and try to get more fluent each time! Try to make sure that you are adding expression at least by the third read through!” Explain the use of the evaluation sheet and assign one student to be the reader and one to be the timer, ask them to switch after first reader reads 3 times.

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       6. “Remember, our goal is to increase our fluency when we are reading, so we have a chart over here with Lightning McQueen! We will use this chart to track our fluency. He is trying to get to the finish line, so we are going to move him a little further every time you increase your words per minute! Work really hard so Lightning can win the race!”

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25         30          35          40          45          50          55          60          65          70          75          80          85

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Assessment: I will call each student up to me to read aloud for me and make sure they are reading fluently and with expression, helping them in places that they need help. This will allow me to see where the students are and how well they grasped the lesson. I will then assess their comprehension by asking questions about the book.

1. What was Lightening McQueen’s favorite thing to do at the beginning of the book?

2. What did he have to do to get out of jail?

3. What did Mater like to do for fun?

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References:

       - Cars Animated book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPbRUUtPE7M

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       - Word Count Sheet: https://sites.google.com/site/sophiessuperlessons/growing-fluency-design/fluency.jpg? 

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       - Lesson Design: Bailey Burns https://sites.google.com/site/lessondesignsbaileyburns/gf-design

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       - Car's Gif and Clip art: Disney Pixar