As part of the fluency routine, teachers learn to engage students in regular pre-reading activities that build background knowledge and to pre-teach critical vocabulary. Vocabulary and background knowledge provide students with entry points into the text, building their schema and ultimately boosting their comprehension as well as their fluent reading of the text. 

For example, a teacher may decide to select a text connected to a topic that students are studying in their social studies class. Pre-reading activities in this case may consist of asking students to recall key facts about what they have learned about the topic and drawing attention to vocabulary that will deepen their understanding of the theme of the reading.

A crucial component of any fluency routine is modeling fluent reading. In Literacy Masterminds fluency routines, teachers provide students with ample time listening to fluent readers, focusing on different components of fluency over the course of multiple readings. 

For example, early in the week, students focus on proper pacing, expression, and accuracy while listening to a teacher’s model read. During subsequent model reads, students might focus on annotating for comprehension, with the goal of answering text-dependent questions. Reading the text multiple times for different purposes allows students to focus on developing the skills specific to fluent reading.

The primary goal of reading is comprehension, so students are best served by understanding that the skills and strategies they learn serve this important purpose. There are multiple routines for students to engage in comprehension practice, including the two illustrated below.

• Whole-Class – After listening to the text read aloud once, students are introduced to text-based questions to anchor their annotations during a second read by the teacher. Students then participate in a check for understanding to assess their comprehension, providing text-based evidence to substantiate their responses. To make them accessible to a variety of learners, checks for understanding may be completed in writing, through discussion, or even in the form of a graphic or illustration. 
• Partners – Students may participate in a partner reading routine called “Paragraph Shrinking,” where students take turns reading aloud for five minutes before pausing to restate the most important “who” or “what” in the paragraph and what happened to them, and then finally restating this information in ten words or less.
  For example, “Thomas Edison was the most important who or what. The most important thing that happened to Thomas Edison was that he was raised on a farm, but he didn’t like living on a farm because he liked working with machines. In 10 words or less, ‘Thomas Edison didn’t like farming; he liked working with machines.’”

Developing fluency necessitates ongoing practice, feedback, and error correction. During their reading routines, students receive feedback as they read aloud. This comes in a variety of forms, including but not limited to:

• Choral reading – Students and a teacher read aloud in unison. The teacher’s voice is slightly louder to provide a model of fluent reading.
• Echo reading – The teacher reads part of a text while students follow along to provide a model of fluent reading. Then, students read the same part aloud in unison.
• Buddy or partner reading – Students work in pairs where a passage is read aloud by one student to another, who is there to provide feedback by identifying words that are read incorrectly and modeling the correct pronunciation. It is important in buddy reading that students are paired strategically, so that one reader is more fluent and can coach the other. In addition, teachers circulate during buddy reads to offer students additional feedback. Partner Reading