Fluency Innovations in a Rural Elementary School: Lessons Learned

Essential factors, such as vocabulary knowledge and fluency, directly impact students’ overall reading comprehension and achievement. This session highlights one school’s eff orts to address the students’ needs in reading by focusing on fl uency. Benton Elementary, a rural high-poverty K-5 school, implemented a variety of schoolwide innovations, such as the Quick Reads program, repeated reading, Fluency Oriented Reading Instruction (FORI) strategies, while also incorporating the study of the 2,500 morphological word families. These word families account for 90 percent of words found in every book listed in appendix B of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Because of these targeted eff orts, students demonstrated signifi cant growth in TCAP reading profi ciency.