Child Fluency

If you want your child to attain true mastery in a subject area or skill, he needs to become fluent.  Attaining fluency is not hard, but it does involve a systematic process to ensure results.  The advantage of fluency activities are that they can be done in any subject area to get great results.

In order to attain the fluency level of an expert, your child needs to perform a particular skill quickly and accurately in a certain period of time.  This will ensure that your child can do the skill automatically (without hesitation), and without the need to practice it on an ongoing basis.

So a fluency activity you can do that applies to any subject area is to time yourself for one minute doing a particular skill you’ve selected, and have your child aim to reach your goal.  In order to reach your goal, your child should do a one minute daily timing of this particular skill until they reach the goal you’ve set.  To keep track of the daily scores, your child would graph them.  Not only would this provide instant feedback, but it would serve as a big motivational boost to see the scores getting better every day.

One simple fluency activity you can do to increase your child’s reading speed is to read out loud at the rate you’d like your child to attain (or use books on tape), while your child reads along with you.  This is going to model for your child what reading fluency looks like, and help him read at a faster rate.  Start out doing this with a grade appropriate book, so that your child doesn’t get frustrated.

A reading comprehension fluency activity you can try is to have your child read a short passage and answer questions in 3-5 minute timings.  Thankfully there is a timed reading comprehension series that has a reading range from 1^st grade to post graduate levels.  One source I know of is the McCall-Crabbs Standard Test Lessons in Reading with a 1926 copyright date.

There are also a variety of fluency activities that can be done for other subject areas.  There are many computer type games out there that use time and accuracy to rate how well a child is doing.  You see this a lot with math software such as Quarter Mile Math, but it’s also present in other subject areas such as geography.  For example, you can access the excellent online geography game Seterra for free. 

The key in determining what could count as a fluency activity is to check and see if the activity is timed.  Remember that being fluent in a certain skill requires you to have accuracy, endurance, and speed.  If your child gets 100 basic math problems 100% accurate but is very slow, then your child has not yet attained fluency in math computation.  All three factors of accuracy, endurance, and speed have to be present in order for fluency to occur.