Name: Thrive! NCHE Homeschool Conference
Start: 2025-05-22T00:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-05-24T23:59:59-05:00
Location: Winston-Salem, NC

Tagged: AAR, all about reading

This topic has 3 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated 12 years, 1 month ago by greenebalts.

Viewing 4 posts - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

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March 29, 2013 at 3:05 am
tld
Participant
It’s sooooo boring for both DS and myself. We Love AAR…..just not that part….and that part ends up taking a huge chunk of our reading instruction time.
So remind me why it’s important? I know it’s good practice for the new blends and such that he’s learning and someone mentioned that it builds stamina for reading longer books. But I’m not sure how much water that second reason holds. Books are supposed to be interesting. This is extremely boring.
Anyone not do all of the Fluency Practice pages? Or are there suggestions for making it more fun? I’ve read that some of you have the child highlight the words they’ve read, but I could really see that slowing us down and dragging things out waaaayyy longer than it already is. At this point, I’m as bad as DS in wanting to quickly get through it and on to the fun stuff. But I don’t want to sacrifice it if there really is solid value to it.
March 29, 2013 at 4:11 pm
Shannon
Participant
Hi TLD,
I don’t have any expert advice for you other than what has worked in my family. My 7yo using AAR1 does do all the fluency pages and I think it has been necessary for him. He is also a rule follower by nature and almost never complains – though sometimes he will take two or even three days to do a full lesson if it is long. Though he can figure out all the words, he is still a very slow reader (we’re on lesson 42 now, btw) and I think the fluency pages are really helpful in him seeing the words over and over. I think they help.
My other son, also 7yo, is doing AAS1 (and not AAR bc they are competitive and compare too much). He is not one to appreciate repetition and so I very selectively choose which words to have him spell. If I know he understands ‘sh’, I give him very few words with that challenge.
So what I’m saying is you’ll need to judge whether you think those fluency pages are helpful or not. If he is doing well in the reading and it feels like he is just doing it to do it, maybe reading something else would be more fun for both of you. Maybe you could decide he does all the ‘new words’ but only 1/4 of the review words. Maybe you could point to some of the words, one from each row maybe and skip all the rest. When you know what skills he already has or which he needs to work on, focus the fluency pages towards that. I love the sentences that are on three rows : Tom had Tom had a drumstick Tom had a drumstick in his lunchbox. They work great for my son so if it were me I’d do all of those but maybe none of the other format for sentences: The cat has a catnip toy. The cat has a catnip toy.
OK this is getting long. My point is if he is progressing in his reading, including in fluency/speed, then feel free to reduce what he needs to do on the fluency pages. I have to agree they are boring and I’m grateful my son doesn’t complain about them.
I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on this.
Best,
Shannon
March 29, 2013 at 7:48 pm
Phobo
Participant
I definitely agree that the fluency sheets are the driest part. We’ve taken up to a week to work on some of those longer ones. My daughter’s still very young though, so I don’t feel pressured to have the level done within a set amount of time, which is nice. I tend to pull out the fluency sheet and have it around the house. We’ll do three words after lunch, two words before piano, five words before bed etc. Just kind of trickle them throughout the day. Otherwise I just find it frustrating for both of us, since she loses focus so easily on them. Sometimes we will make a bit of a silly game out of them. Like if she reads five words, she gets to do five jumping jacks or something like that. Or she’ll read a line from the sheet and run and put a token in a bucket on the other side of the room and have to run back and read another line. You could take some of the words from the fluency sheet that are the most challenging for the child, and cut them out and tape them on to dice (we have large wooden ones), and then have your child roll them and read the words that land facing up. These are all things my daughter finds more engaging than just reading them off of a sheet.
I think when they’re into the higher levels, it would probably be easier to skip the fluency sheets and just have more varied, interesting readers as review. In level one though, they only know specific letters and sounds, so it’s difficult to find other readers that are right at their level at that time, making the fluency sheets their best option.
Rachel
March 30, 2013 at 2:45 am
greenebalts
Participant
Oh…I’m glad we’re not alone….LOL. Our son hates the fluency practice pages!! He would much rather read from the readers. I do make him read the pages once and then we move on. I also used the sentences to create sentence strips and tried to make it a game. You can read more about it here…. http://reflectionsfromdrywoodcreek.blogspot.com/2013/02/all-about-reading-sentence-strips.html

Blessings,
Melissa
http://reflectionsfromdrywoodcreek.blogspot.com/