FluentZoo
Reading Fluency?
Time for FluentZoo
How FluentZoo works...
The core of FluentZoo is a set 40 text-based teaching sessions, designed to fit into a school's existing reading curriculum.
Each 20-30 minute session is fully resourced with a teaching presentation (with helpful supporting notes) and a motivating text ready for a busy teacher to use right away.
The sessions feature a wide range of poems, playscripts and short stories, both modern and classic.
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During the sessions, children will have the chance to listen to the teacher perform a modelled read, which lets them hear how an experienced reader brings a text to life.
Then they will take part in some echo reading, before putting what they've learnt into practice through either paired reading, choral reading or reader's theatre. All of the FluentZoo sessions include plenty of opportunities for repeated reading a text, one of the simplest and best ways to build children's automaticity, expression and confidence.
Some schools choose to use FluentZoo as part of their usual whole-class or small-group reading planning, with a fluency session once per week for a term. Other schools chose to block their fluency sessions together, with a fluency focus at the start of the year, and then using the ideas and concepts children have learnt through the rest of the year's reading lessons.
FluentZoo sessions are organised across four stages, with each stage offering a growing level of challenge:
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Stage 1 sessions are short and teacher-led, using interesting and motivating texts that no-one in the class should find too tricky, allowing them to concentrate on how they read, rather than decoding the words.
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Stage 2 sessions build on what children have learnt at Stage 1, working with the teacher to read slightly longer, more-complicated texts and a wider range of reading challenges.
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Stage 3 of FluentZoo introduces children to longer texts by a range of different authors, written in different styles and for different purposes, supporting their growing fluency as well as their comprehension.
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Stage 4 sessions are designed to introduce children to more challenging texts to read aloud, including literary heritage texts that feature archaic language. The presentations have been designed to appeal to older children, too (which means the animals from FluentZoo only appear occasionally…).
Some schools choose to use one stage each year (between Year 2/P3 and Year 5/P6 or Year 3/P4 and Year 6/P7, for example), while others use them over a shorter timescale (over Years 3 and 4, for example).
As well as the text-based sessions, there are 135 shorter sessions, created to extend and support the text-based sessions.
These short, interactive, joyful reading sessions give children the chance to practise key aspects of fluency such as:
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reading words and phrases quickly and accurately at a glance
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reading clearly with confidence
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adding emphasis to reflect the meaning of a text
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capturing the mood and tone of a text
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reading with feeling and emotion
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reading in character
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using punctuation and other clues in a text
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decoding complicated, multi-syllabic words
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(Don’t worry, that last one is a lot more fun than it sounds.)
Altogether, that's 175 chances for every child to become a keen, confident, fluent reader.
175 chances to read aloud with friends and have some fun.
175 chances to become a lifelong reader with all of the benefits that brings.
That sounds pretty good to us.
Sample FluentZoo Sessions
Take a peek at our FluentZoo text-based sections and see if they're right for you & the children you teach...
