Whole group fluency: a year long literacy project (part one)

This post is adapted from a previous Facebook post from November:

One tremendous experience I was part of for the 2021-2022 school year was a literacy culture-building endeavor with my 2nd grade class. I was asked to lead the 2nd and 3rd grade teams in literacy professional development called the “Capacity Builder Program”. My role was to build and demonstrate whole and small group fluency and comprehension practices based on the Science of Reading series the district was launching for the second year to K-3 teachers at the 13 Priority Schools as part of the Third-Grade Reading Goal. our teacher team completed three cycles of learning: Fluency, Comprehension, and Text-Dependent Questions. Fluency practice had a significant positive impact of our classroom reading culture, and I’d love to share more about it and provide a link to an example recording.

In October, I introduced our fluency practice to my students as a group effort to increase our whole group fluency through choral reading exercises. We’d read and recited poems, excerpts of fiction and nonfiction, and folktales.

Seattle Public Schools was lucky enough to have Gholdy Muhammad as our keynote speaker during the August 2021 back-to-school training. She’s the author of Cultivating Genius, which is a historically responsive literacy framework for recreating the Black Excellence of literacy circles. The book is excellent. Whole group fluency acitivies like mantras (one of her suggested activities) embody her five pursuits of literacy: identity, skill development, intellectualism, criticality, and joy.

One of the practices of literacy circles is to create an authentic mantra for reciting each day. We were in the process of writing that mantra as a class. Our process included reading practice of other mantras and poems. My teaching partner Rin Stone found this mantra and the kids were stoked on it. We practiced until we have our own written. It’s call-and-response, and I thought we could all use its joyful message.

Have a listen to the students recite “We Push Through.”

A student and I demonstrate partner reading and feedback for the class.