The 6 Minute Solution

1. The 6 Minute Solution Teaching your students to be fluent readers

2. Reading • Do your students hate to read? • Do your students struggle over high frequency words? • Is it painful to listen to your students read out loud? • Are your students meeting standards?

3. What does the research say? • There is a high correlation between comprehension and fluency. Comprehension suffers when students lack fluency. • If students are not fluent, cognitive energies are focused on decoding and word recognition and therefore are not available for comprehension. • 44% of 4th grade readers are not fluent readers. • Research shows that educators have the knowledge and tools to affect this problem.

4. Why teach fluency? • Nothing is more painful and frustrating to a teacher than to hear a student arduously reading a sentence word by word, seeming to have to physically drag himself or herself to the end of the sentence • The 6 Minute Solution is a research-based, highly effective instructional procedure for grades 3-8 that builds reading fluency in only 6 minutes of the instructional day • Good readers as well as struggling readers benefit from this daily fluency practice

5. Fluency can be taught • Guided, repeated oral-reading procedures are appropriate and valuable avenues for increasing reading fluency and overall reading achievement • Fluency practice supports comprehension • As students build fluency through rereading, they amass a larger reading vocabulary Click here for more info

6. How the Program Works • Students are paired with a student who reads at approximately the same level and speed. • Partner 1 reads for one minute while partner 2 listens and records errors. • CWPM are recorded on student’s Fluency Record. • Students switch roles.

7. Pre-Assessment • Assessment is critical in determining fluency partners and in selection of the appropriate reading level of the Practice Passages. • Students’ instructional reading levels using the San Diego Quick. • Students’ oral fluency rates on a Practice Passage (CWPM - correct words per minute).

8. Selecting Fluency Partners • Create Excel spreadsheets using pre-assessments data • Match students as closely as possible by both their oral-reading fluency rates and their instructional reading levels • An appropriate match is critical to success

9. Training Students • Spend ample time training students in the procedures • Instruct students in appropriate fluency partnership behavior • Employ an explicit instructional model when teaching the procedures • Model, model, model • Give feedback and remodel before students practice the procedures independently

10. Program Advantages • Program can be used with the entire class daily. • Students are responsible for keeping track of their progress. Students can see their improvement. • Students continue to encounter more challenging texts during school year so all students continue to grow.

11. Summary • Students reread to build fluency • Student partners work together to build fluency • Fluency influences decoding, comprehension and reading achievement • Work completion and reading achievement improve