Melissa & Lori Love Literacy ™

[Listen Again] Ep. 62: Effective Fluency Instruction with Tim Rasinski

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From June 22, 2021

In this episode, reading and fluency expert Tim Rasinski tells us all about effective fluency instruction! How does repeated reading build fluency instruction? Why does text difficulty level impact fluency practice? What do effective accuracy, automaticity, and expression sound like?

Check out research, articles, and helpful materials located on Tim's website and follow Tim on Twitter @TimRasinski1. We also discuss this piece by Nell Duke.


We answer your questions about teaching reading in The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night.

Grab free resources and episode alerts! Sign up for our email list at literacypodcast.com.

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Lori:

Welcome teacher friend. I'm Lori and I'm Melissa. We are two literacy educators in Baltimore. We want the best for all kids and we know you do too.

Melissa:

Our district recently adopted a new literacy curriculum, which meant a lot of change for everyone, lori and I can't wait to keep learning about literacy with you today.

Lori:

Hi everyone. Welcome to Melissa and Lori Love Literacy literacy podcast. I am super excited for today's guest because I have had a literacy crush on him for a very long time and I can't wait to talk more with him today. Melissa, I know you know him a little bit.

Melissa:

But well, my thing right now is fluency. In Baltimore City, that's all I talk about. People are like yes, Melissa, we get it fluency. So for me, talking to Tim Brzezinski is huge, because I think when people think of fluency, they think of Tim Rosensky, so I'm really excited.

Lori:

I agree, and Tim doesn't know, but he changed the course of my career when I read his why Fluency is Hot article a long time ago. So we are super excited, tim, welcome to the podcast.

Tim Rasinski :

Thanks, lori and Melissa. I'm glad to be here. I was wondering why my ears had been burning the last month. All that UNC work you've done in the Baltimore schools really good stuff. I had a chance to take a look at it and it's really neat to see creative teachers doing things that are not only engaging for kids but really make a difference in kids' lives. So, yeah, well done.

Melissa:

Awesome. Thank you yeah.

Lori:

Well, yeah, and I know that. So I'm just going to do a quick rundown, Melissa, because I know that, not. You know, if you don't know everything about Tim, he's the professor of literacy education at Kent State University. Tim, are you still the director of the reading clinic there?

Tim Rasinski :

I'm not sure to be honest with you.

Lori:

We run the reading clinic in the summertime and of course last summer with got lots of books and other things that you put out and I don't want to give too much away, because we're going to talk about the specific things that will help with fluency and lots of other topics we're going to talk about, so that's great.

Melissa:

Cool yeah, Before we jump in, Tim, I'm wondering like, how did fluency become your thing? How did you get to this point of being the fluency superhero?

Tim Rasinski :

Well, first of all, I'm not the superhero, but it's an old story, actually. For me it was actually when I was a reading interventionist outside of Omaha, nebraska, over 40 years ago, and I'd been a classroom teacher and then was working on my master's degree, and so I thought, well, okay, work with struggling readers, become an interventionist. So I'm working with these kids, we're having difficulty in reading and I'm doing everything the book says. You know, I'm working on phonics, working on vocabulary comprehension, and many of the kids were making good progress, but still there were some who were just. You know, no matter what I did, they were flatlining, you might say, weren't not making much progress despite my best efforts.

Tim Rasinski :

And, fortunately for me, I was working on my master's degree at the University of Nebraska, at Omaha, and I still remember the profs had us reading some of these articles that were beginning to appear on reading fluency. One was called Fluency, the Neglected Goal of the Reading Program, dick Ellington. Another one's called the Method of Repeated Readings by Dr J Samuels and, of course, this great one by Carol Chomsky, after Decoding what? After? You're working with kids and you teach them decoding and they're still not making any progress in one. And of course, her answer was reading fluency. So I read these and I thought to myself, yeah, there's something to this.

Tim Rasinski :

And so I tried some of these methods that Dr Samuels, dick Allington were talking about. And, lo and behold, some of these kids began to take off and in some cases it was breathtaking the progress they were making. And it wasn't just their reading, it was their confidence. They started to say, yeah, I can do this. I just have to do, you know, maybe read a text more than once and maybe read it with another person who's perhaps a slightly better or more fluent reader than I am, but it was really quite, quite amazing and it was a real eye opener. So I got on that horse 40 odd years ago and I'm still on it. So I do think it is something that is a can be a game changer for many kids.

Lori:

Yeah, yeah and hopefully the uh, the work that Baltimore is doing, we'll be able to show that in the future. You know the near future. So I'm curious about um I mentioned it earlier the uh why fluency should be hot. That article changed my life and I remember reading it in a teacher professional development and then just over and over and over again and really trying to get my hands on everything else that you had written about fluency.

Tim Rasinski :

Can I give you a little background to that article?

Lori:

Yes, so I wanted you to tell me all about it and everything that we would need to know about why it should be hot.

Tim Rasinski :

For years the International Literacy Association I guess back then it was the International Reading Association would do this survey. They would ask 50, 60 experts what are the hot topics in reading, and for every every single year, when they asked about reading fluency, the consensus answer was it's not hot, it's not a hot topic. And not only is it not hot, it shouldn't be hot. And of course, well, being a person who's invested in fluency, that kind of pissed me off. Sorry about that. Hopefully you'll edit that one out. But I said well, let's write an article why it should be hot. And so that was the genesis, for that article is in response to so many experts who were saying it's not hot, and I think there's a reason for that, why the reason they were saying that. But still, I thought I needed to have to try to respond to that in some way. So I'm glad I'm at least influenced one person.

Lori:

Just one. I mean no, I mean lots of them, but that's so interesting because it is one of the five pillars. Yeah, and you would think it. I mean, at some point it should be hot, right, yeah, hot topic.

Tim Rasinski :

Yeah, I think part of it has been just the way it's been thought of. First of all, it has that two dimensions to it. It's automaticity and word recognition, but it's also porosity or expressiveness, and so one of the things is that you focus on one at the expense of the other. I think that's happened. In fact, what's often happened with the automaticity component is that has somehow morphed into making kids read fast. We measure automaticity by speed of reading and so, ok, well, we'll improve reading by getting kids kids read fast. We measure automaticity by speed of reading and so, okay, we'll improve reading by getting kids to read faster.

Tim Rasinski :

And of course that doesn't work at all. Very well, we end up with fast readers but not very good readers, and we often associate it with oral reading. You know, to read fluently you have to read orally. But you know the way we read orally also reflects how we read silently. So there's a connection there. But again, the thought was well, we're not too concerned about oral reading come fourth or fifth grade, so let's just put that off to the side.

Tim Rasinski :

And then another part was just that, the idea that it was just for younger kids um, you know, primary grade kids, and it certainly is, absolutely, absolutely. Jean Chaw puts it, I think, in around grades grade two and three and her model of reading. But you know, kids are not fluent. At the end of grade three the fluency just doesn't go away. It actually it actually becomes an albatross for many kids, and so it's. It's something that even goes well beyond the primary grades. So I think for those reasons, you know, it kind of got pushed off to the side and of course all this emphasis on phonics, you know, sort of kind of drowned out all the conversation about everything else, and I think that's a bit unfortunate, because fluency is well a bridge, if you will, a link between word recognition and comprehension at the other side, and most kids develop that bridge on their own. But if they don't, then we've got to help them, we've got to do something to help those kids develop that fluency.

Melissa:

Yeah.

Tim Rasinski :

Yeah.

Melissa:

Yeah, I was telling you all before that when I was a younger teacher, I and I always taught middle school and high school. So this was middle school, but I was in a reading specialist program and so I wanted to try things out and I, I was all in on fluency and I did the timed reading and then, all of a sudden, I had 28th graders who were just speed reading and I was just like this is a mess, this is not what I wanted to happen, and I that what you just said, which was like well then, forget it, because this is just a mess.

Tim Rasinski :

Right right, you know and I have no qualm against teachers who work on this. They're well meaning, they want, but it's it's our job, you know, as people who work in professional development, to help teachers understand what it, what this is. I do want kids to become fast readers, there's no question about it, but I want them to become fast the way all of us have you know, who are part of this podcast got to be fast readers. What do we do? We read a lot.

Tim Rasinski :

Nobody told me to read fast. We just developed that automatic word recognition and you know speech is a consequence of that, it's not a cause. And you know speech is a consequence of that, it's not a cause. So you know, we want to really want to avoid that. But yeah, I can relate to that myself, melissa. I've seen many, many good teachers do that, and no fault of their own.

Lori:

Good intentions, yeah, I feel like we should have a fluency confessional based on what we, what we've shared with you previously.

Lori:

I mean they, yeah, it's a lot. I did it too and I remember being delivered timers to my classroom, like because everybody got timers work on fluency, and then I was I know I shared this with you all before but it makes me laugh so I'll say it again but when I taught second grade, like in some I don't know the teacher found this as a resource and shared it with everyone and everyone's like wow, this is such a great way to teach fluency. And you're like literally reading a number line or alphabet strip that is interspersed with different punctuation, marks of punctuation, so it'd be like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and you know, basically not challenging at all which kind of flips fluency on its head. And you know the way that. That's why I think your article was so impactful, because I stopped doing that after I read it. But you know, I'm curious if you might want to uplift Tim what kinds of texts should or can teachers use that are effective in teaching fluency?

Tim Rasinski :

If I may, I will say this in response to our earlier conversation In our reading clinic we do test kids and we do the one-minute reading. You know, the devil's aims weapon, and so on. It's a good measure, it really is. But the thing is, you know, it's not a way, it's not a method of instruction. So when we, when we give kids a passage to read, we say I want your best reading, not your fastest, your very best reading, and that that is enough for cue for many kids.

Lori:

Yeah, because I mean you read different texts different ways. Oh yeah, of course.

Tim Rasinski :

Yeah, sometimes you just want to, you know, mull over a text, perhaps an interesting word that you come across or an interesting idea that, as opposed to but as far as texts go, pretty much any text can lend itself to fluency. But in particular, I've kind of focused on kinds of, some kinds of texts we don't use too much in school anymore. You know, if you think about fluency often associated with oral reading, are there texts that are meant to be read orally? And of course yeah, of course poetry scripts, as in readers, theater scripts, speeches from American history or from history itself. It could be monologues, dialogues, jokes, perhaps songs oh, we do a lot of work with songs with our kids. But these are texts that are meant to be read out loud and they're meant to be read with expression. So when kids rehearse them, you know that's what they should be focusing on, not just trying to read it fast. But you know, to raise my voice, lower my voice, have a dramatic pause here, because in doing so what you're actually doing is you're reflecting the meaning of the text. If you have a listener listening to you read, they're more able to understand what it is. You're reading by your expressiveness, your oral expressiveness. So there's your connection and comprehension right there. To read something with fluency, with expression, you have to really have some degree of understanding of the text that you are reading.

Tim Rasinski :

And the other thing about these kinds of texts, and especially poetry, is they're not terribly long texts. You know, and if you're working with younger kids and if you're working with kids who struggle, sometimes they can be overwhelmed by a text that you know is 10, 20, 30 pages long. Oh, I can't handle this. But you know they can handle. You know a 10-line poem perhaps, or even something a little bit longer, and not only that. You know the rhythm, the rhyme, the melody. All those things make a poem, or, for that matter, a song, easy to learn. You know how many of us as adults remember uh easy, easy to learn. You know how many of us as adults remember uh poems that we learned as kids, you know in school, they just there's something about the, the nature of these texts that make them very memorable.

Tim Rasinski :

Uh, I often tell the story about, um, my wife and I, up until the pandemic, had gone to uh work, to not work, but we would volunteer at a local Alzheimer's memory unit and we would go there once a week and just sit around and chat with these folks. And it was kind of interesting because these folks would not remember us from one week to the next, as you might expect. What would happen is, before we would leave, we would have a little sing-along get everybody together and we do a little sing-along. Get everybody together and we'd do a little sing-along, all those old-fashioned songs, you know. And what I find so amazing is, as I said, these folks don't remember us, but they would remember the songs, even if we brought in a new one.

Tim Rasinski :

You know, don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me, and you know, if you think about that, you know what's a sight word. In reading, a sight word is nothing more than a memorized word. Well, I say, put those words to rhythm, to rhyme, to melody. You're going to remember forever. Even dementia is going to have a hard time erasing them from your memory. But sometimes it's interesting how we come to those insights.

Melissa:

That's really interesting.

Lori:

Yeah, that's true, I mean so my daughter could not remember my phone number for the life of us. I mean I, I it, so my daughter could not remember my phone number for of for the life of us. I mean we were really having a hard time and once I put it to, I think I I don't even know, I'm not going to sing my phone number so everybody can call me but I put it to like a little nursery rhyme song, rhyme song and um, it's now.

Lori:

I mean now even you know if she, if someone asks my phone number, I hear I can see her pause and I know she's singing it for just a second until she. But it's true music. You know putting stuff to music is really powerful, but even what you said about those.

Lori:

You know the, the short clips and and helping to um and reinforce that flu. I'm thinking about and Melissa, I know you have a grade eight example that you want to share too from Witten Wisdom, just because it came up. But I'm thinking about in grade five that in Witten Wisdom students engage in a whole wordplay module and they read and watch Abbott and Costello who's on first? Oh, yeah.

Lori:

And as they are working with it, after you know engaging with it, they are so engaged in it, so funny, and I mean often, um, you know you go back later in the year and they still can talk about it and remember it. And, um, just, I mean, think about how that's something as small as that is helping to build their fluency in that moment. And they do understand the purpose of it too, right, they're doing it and they understand that it's supposed to be funny and how they should say it and act it.

Tim Rasinski :

But isn't it interesting? It's those memorable moments like those are the ones that we remember from our school, when we have that chance to be performers, uh, have a chance to be creative, uh, with our voices, and I think we need to try to get more of those into our, into our school, into our classrooms. One of the things I mentioned also about text is the difficulty level. You know, I we've been having this argument about what's the appropriate level for reading, and there's I think there's a growing, uh, growing body of evidence that supports having kids read more challenging material. Uh, you know, and steven steve stall did a study back back in their 20 or so years ago, 15 years ago in in Georgia, with second graders with repeated readings. Now, many of the listeners know that repeated readings have a kid read a text more than once as a great fluency builder. But what Steve found was when the kids made the greatest progress, when the material they were asked to read repeatedly was above, was at their frustration level, was at a level that we probably would not normally recommend for them. And yet here they are practicing it, and I think it was the idea of practice and support that allowed them to handle a more challenging piece and in doing so you know they were able to accelerate their progress in reading. So it really this whole notion of fluency is beginning to challenge our notion of what's the appropriate text for kids.

Tim Rasinski :

In our reading clinic we give kids, I like to say, interest trumps difficulty. We give kids easy stuff sometimes, we give them stuff right at their level, but we also challenge them too if they're more interested in that kind of material. Can you imagine a fifth grader reading the cremation of Sam McGee? There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold. The Arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold. The Northern lights have seen queer sights, but the queerest they ever did see was the night on the marge of Lake LaBarge. I cremated Sam McGee, and it goes on and on and on but, I mean talk about a fifth grader.

Tim Rasinski :

Uh, cremation is a great topic, yeah yeah, but uh, yeah, it's really neat to see kids you know, just not only the the joy and the confidence that comes when they when they say I can learn something, I can, I can read something as well as anybody.

Melissa:

That's where everyone gets to be at that level where they can be successful and know it I was telling you all about the example from wit and wisdom that I I always find is like such a great example, especially for older students. In the eighth grade first module they they read a book that's a book of poetry, but then they also write their own poetry and they have to perform it. And so throughout the whole module, for a quarter, they're like writing their own poems, reading their own poems to each other over and over and practicing with the poems that are in the novel, and it's just like there's such a purpose to it. But they get to be creative and right right really powerful to see.

Melissa:

It doesn't feel like you know they're doing fluencies as something separate. It feels, like it's part of it.

Tim Rasinski :

And it's so neat at the end of the week when you know the teacher can dim the lights in the classroom and pull down the shades. You know the class is a poetry slam or a reading theater festival. They're all performing what they had been, so they actually have a purpose now to engage in that repeated reading or their rehearsal. It's the performance on Friday.

Lori:

I've been doing that during COVID with my daughter and she's been, she's been doing fluency work with, with grade level texts, and I don't know if you can see it behind me, see that big podcast microphone. Okay, I let her read into that or use these headset and I mean you would think that I gave her a million bucks, I mean she's so pumped too, I mean.

Lori:

But it's true, Like kids just love the simple things and it's the little stuff that can get them motivated. And, like you said, like that Friday, you know, fluency Friday that's an amazing way to to build fluency practice in.

Tim Rasinski :

Making it authentic, making it like something you know, something you know we as adults do, I, I. One of my favorite quotes is from john dewey, who said something to the fact that we should make our classrooms I think he used the word embryonic, uh, classroom communities. In other words, they should reflect what happens in real life. You know, and if you're a tv or radio broadcaster, you'd be using a microphone like one you have behind you, uh, laurie, and so why not bring that kind of stuff in? Just make it real for kids. Yeah, it's when we make things artificial that they don't see the purpose in it. Yeah, and, um, you know, are just not not terribly engaged, and of that's true for teachers too, when we ask teachers to do those kinds of things as well. You know, things that are highly scripted, instruction, kind of getting off. I'm getting on my soapbox, that's okay.

Melissa:

I do have a question for you about. You know, I work with secondary schools. So I'm wondering, you know, when we look at our standards, fluency is not there, and so I think you know there's a general assumption like that's not a problem for us, right? We don't have to worry about that. You know, I don't believe that, but I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to fluency for older students. Pump up.

Lori:

Melissa's tires right now is what she needs. No for sure, Fluency for older students. Pump up Melissa's tires right now is what she needs.

Tim Rasinski :

Well, you know, in an ideal world, fluency shouldn't be a problem for secondary. You know kids should develop their fluency, you know, by the end of fifth grade or so in my ideal world. But we don't live in an ideal world. We have a lot of kids, especially those kids we worry the most about. Fluency is the issue. We did a study a few years ago in one of our urban schools in our neck of the woods, canton, ohio, and we were working with ninth graders and we just had them read a passage it was about the Wright brothers, if I'm not mistaken but what we did was we did the one-minute read, or we took their first minute of reading, and we found that over half these students were well below what would have been eighth grade norms. We didn't even have ninth grade norms to look at, so we looked at eighth grade norms and over half of them were significantly below that.

Melissa:

That's what we're finding too.

Tim Rasinski :

Yeah, and so? And what do we do about it? You know, aside from you, know you, melissa? You know we have great secondary teachers, but most of them don't have that training or that knowledge in reading fluency. So what do they do? Well, let's work on comprehension, let's build vocabulary, which is great, but if you never work on fluency, how do you ever expect kids to you know, to develop in that area?

Tim Rasinski :

We did another study a couple of years ago. I did this. We did another study a couple of years ago with college students and the same thing. We had college I think these were college sophomores and we had them read a passage it was a 12th grade passage and then we correlated it with the students' ACT scores. So they're college students. So, first of all, these are probably pretty good readers to begin with. But what we found was that you could actually predict ACT performance by one minute of reading. One minute of reading. Those kids who were more automatic, you know, reflected in a speedier read. They tended to have higher scores on the ACT reading section, which, of course, that's a silent reading comprehension score. Oral reading fluency predicts silent reading comprehension, even into college.

Tim Rasinski :

So you know it's something that we can't neglect, and so whenever I get a chance like this to you know, be interviewed by great professionals like you guys, I jump on it.

Melissa:

So thank you be interviewed by great professionals like you guys. I, I jump on it. So thank you. Yeah, the one thing I always talk about is that like amount of energy that students need, right, so that like, if they're still putting energy into the figuring out what each word is, they don't have the energy to make any meaning of what they're reading.

Tim Rasinski :

Right, right, that that that I use that often myself. I think it was. Jay Samuels actually talked about it. He says that we have a finite amount of. He called it attention, I believe, but I would call it cognitive resources or whatever. And if we have to use too much of those resources for word decoding, figuring out what the words mean, we don't have that left over, that we've lost that and it can no longer be applied to comprehension.

Tim Rasinski :

You know, we see these kids all the time when they read. They're slow, full of effort, letter by letter, sound by sound. So I say god bless these kids for working so hard, but they're putting all their effort in the wrong area. Um, we want to be automatic, like us, I mean something. I I tell my. I teach a course here, uh, in phonics, and one of the first things I tell my students is the goal of phonics instruction is to get kids not to use phonics. If you have to use phonics when you're reading, you're in big trouble because you're stopping at every third and fourth word, sounding it out. Yeah, you can do it, but there's a price to be paid, and of course we know what it is. It's comprehension. You don't understand something when you're just kind of word by word through a text there, one of the one you remind you kind of jogged my memory here.

Tim Rasinski :

One of the things I one of the analogies I often use is learning how to drive a car. When we first learn to drive a car, you know all our attention had to be devoted to the steering wheel and the gas pedal and the gear shift, and if the radio was turned on you had to turn it off because that was distracting. But with a little bit of practice, not only did we become automatic or accurate in our driving. We could put it in the mailbox and running over the curb we also became automatic in our driving.

Tim Rasinski :

And the evidence of that is have you ever driven someplace and not know how you got there? You know your mind was wandering. It was another place. So now we can read when we drive a car. We can multitask, we can drive safely and accurately and still listen to the radio. Some states I don't know if it's true in Maryland but you can talk on the phone, you can converse with the passenger, you can multitask. And in reading it's the same thing we want reading as a multitask activity. You have to figure out the words. But if you can do that automatically, you can do that other task, which is pay attention to meaning, create meaning.

Lori:

Yeah.

Tim Rasinski :

I like that.

Lori:

I like that analogy.

Tim Rasinski :

Yeah, and how did we get that way? You drive a lot, right, you practice it a lot and you know you might drive your parents' car for a while and, interestingly enough, once you get automatic on that car, it transfers, that knowledge transfers to other automobiles. And it's the same thing in reading Once you get automatic on one passage, uh, there's a, there's a degree of transfer, uh, to other passages as well.

Lori:

Yeah, it's like you're, but you, I think you made a good point. Um, I can't. I don't know if it was on this call or the precox. I feel like I've talked to you a couple of times this week and once you construct these skills, you then don't have to. You're never deconstructing them. So, like the, the, the, you don't want to use phonics anymore to to break it down. I don't want to use phonics anymore, to break it down.

Lori:

I don't want to be, like you know, trying to figure out what I'm doing as I'm driving like click up to use the wipers, and I'm not trying to. I'm trying to use it fluidly rather than deconstruct.

Tim Rasinski :

Yeah, and that's a good word Fluidly, fluently. It's just done without really conscious thought or minimal conscious thought about doing it, so you can keep your eye on the road.

Lori:

Yeah, exactly, more conscious thought about doing it so you can keep your eye on the road.

Lori:

Yeah, exactly, um.

Lori:

So I'm curious, like I feel like fluency putting aside, you know, I guess, other conversations that we could have just for the for for the moment um, around phonics and decoding, um, and that cognitive load fluency does seem like the lowest hanging fruit in in like the five reading pillars, like.

Lori:

Yet I do believe, because of what I've seen in classrooms, that it is usually the first thing to get pushed aside, like well, we don't have time for this, or you know they'll do that for homework, versus you know, prioritizing, like you know, when I'm giving an example right when students come into the class, versus doing a journal entry that doesn't relate to anything, like you know how was your weekend, or whatever, instead of using the fluent, instead of using that time to build fluency, right. So, and again, if a teacher is listening and they're asking their students what they did over the weekend I'm not criticizing, I'm just giving a specific example. So why is it, in your opinion, do you think that fluency is the first thing to kind of get pushed to the side instead of elevated to the top as like, hey, this is like a low-hanging fruit that we can definitely get really good at very quickly.

Tim Rasinski :

Yeah, well, I think part of it has been this misunderstanding about what constitutes fluency. You know the reading fast teachers get to the point where they begin to rebel against that and say, ok, this making kids read fast isn't working. So they just give it up, you know, and say let's move on, do something else. So some degree of that. And it does require perhaps a different way of thinking about reading instruction. You're not necessarily getting kids into. You know, doing worksheets on phonics You're not engaging them all the time on comprehension. You know how well they understand things. You know some of the key elements is practice. The kids have to read things in. You know practice reading those particular texts. And you know that's not anything that you would find in a normal classroom, at least in a traditional classroom. So it really requires us to think about. You know how can we actually create a protocol, if you will, in our classrooms? One of the ones I love is this idea about having a weekly well, we kind of alluded to it earlier a weekly performance, say on Fluency Friday. But what happens is early in the week, the children, the students, are assigned something that they are going to be practicing or rehearsing throughout the week. So you know, one way of doing this might be. One example might be imagine let's try a middle grade classroom. So let's, we're going to study, we're going to study great American poets all year long. So say, one week we're going to look at the poetry of Emily Dickinson. So every student is assigned a poem by Emily Dickinson. One of the nice things about that is all of her stuff is public domain. You know, talk about low hanging fruit, but then you know way we often talk about this is on. Well, on Monday the teacher reads all the material to kids. You know, reads it out loud. The kids follow along in their own copies. Tuesday, we read it all quarterly. On wednesday the kids get a small group and they practice and the teacher goes around coaches giving them feedback. Thursday, we do a rehearsal, uh, quick rehearsal. And then on friday we invite the school principal into our classroom, uh, parents, maybe some visitors. They come into class and, as I said, we dim the lights, we down the shades, light some candles and the kids perform there. And then the next week, well, let's look at the poetry by Robert Frost, or perhaps Amanda Gorman.

Tim Rasinski :

You know, every week could be a different poet, and not only. You know you're exploring the poet and their poetry, but you're also developing fluency. So it really is. It's more than just fluency itself and it's done in a very authentic sort of way. All of that takes only about 10 minutes a day, 15 minutes. Much of the rehearsal can be done at home as well.

Tim Rasinski :

But if we could find a way of actually creating a protocol like that on a weekly basis and it doesn't have to be poetry maybe one week we'll do reader's theater scripts, maybe we'll do songs, and or we can combine them Maybe, you know, around a couple of weeks last week we were commemorating Memorial Day the Friday performance could have been, you know, some patriotic poetry, but it could also have been as a group singing some patriotic songs God Bless America, perhaps, or some of those other great patriotic songs that we have. So to me it's finding that authentic protocol that we can put into play. And, you know, don't just save it for Write to Read Week. You know this has got to be part and parcel of our regular reading instruction.

Lori:

Yeah.

Tim Rasinski :

And the research shows that. I've been working with a colleague of mine, chase Young, and David Page and Chase in particular has been working on developing that routine and we find that not only do kids improve in terms of their fluency, as you'd expect, but comprehension improves as well, significantly, especially when you compare kids in in um classrooms where this kind of instruction is not going on.

Melissa:

So the reason we talk about the science of reading and the science of reading does support this, this approach to fluency yeah, we had a teacher who was working with a small group of students and she was using the same text that they were seeing in their ela classroom, which was written wisdom, and this is totally qualitative. It it's not research, but but you know the the kids said at the end that they felt so much more confident in the ELA class because of the fluency work they were doing in that small group, because they had they just could, they knew it better. They felt so much more confident.

Tim Rasinski :

Yeah, and confidence is so much. You know, if you believe in yourself, you're going to you're more likely to invest yourself and make sure that you accomplish whatever goals you have. You know how many of us, as adults, even do things that we're not very good at. We tend to avoid those. I mean, you know kids don't have that confidence and solace, you know. You know they find ways of skipping it or getting out of having to do that reading assignment. I'll just, you know, get the cliff notes version of it or whatever. Do they still have cliff notes? I don't know.

Lori:

I think, so, actually, I think there's sparks now. Aren't they sparks Spark notes? I don't know, I haven't used them in a very long time.

Melissa:

Well, is there any new research out there about fluency that we don't know about?

Tim Rasinski :

Well, yeah, it's going on all the time. I'll mention a couple, though. The first was and Sharon Vaughn has done some work in this, and she published maybe two or three years ago. She's not the first author, but she worked with, I think, one of her students, and they published a review of research on children identified as learning disabled, LD kids, kids who struggle in reading and their conclusion was looking at a number of studies across the board was that repeated reading and assisted reading assisted reading is where you read something and you hear it read to you at the same time, as well as some sort of combination, actually produced results, the positive results in terms of comprehension and fluency among these kids that we worry about. We always knew that, but I mean, here it comes out. Another study came out looking at fluency with older kids, and again, the same sort of results was that it does lead to improvements in comprehension and fluency, as you would expect. Improvements in comprehension and fluency as you would expect.

Tim Rasinski :

Most recently, though and I don't know if this is a study or not, but the National Assessment of Educational Progress you know that's the US Department of Ed. They do this you know nation's report card every four years, and they tell us we're not doing so well. Anyways, they took the 2018 data and they had like 2000 these are fourth graders, uh, and and they had them read a passage, you know and they measured on fluency. Now, the fluency was measured in three different ways. Uh, first was accuracy, and what they found was that accuracy was associated with achievement. Those students who were at the highest level of silent reading comprehension achievement were the best in terms of accuracy. They were 100% accuracy in terms of word recognition. But as you went down in terms of their reading achievement, so did accuracy, but it didn't go down hugely, it went down moderately.

Tim Rasinski :

The huge differences were with automaticity reading rate speed. Those kids who were, again, the highest in terms of reading comprehension fourth graders were the most automatic, I hate to say the fastest. They were the most automatic in their word recognition. But again, every time there was a drop in achievement, there was a continuing drop in terms of automaticity as well. But then the third one was expression. One of the things they did was they brought in teachers or experts who listened to these students read and then they rated them on. I believe it was a four point scale and, again, what they found was a quite significant difference in terms of expression. Those students who were the highest achievers read with good expression, good phrasing and again, with every drop in achievement there was a drop in terms of expression as well.

Tim Rasinski :

So all three of those combined accuracy, automaticity and prosody were associated with reading achievement and, of course, the outcome of that, the implication, is that we need to be paying attention, even with fourth graders. Usually we say by fourth grade we don't need to be worrying too much about word decoding, but we do, especially with our kids who struggle. But even those other areas automaticity and prosody uh, they're with you. When you have a a nearly 2 000 students that are participating in the study, you know the results are pretty reliable. So, again, you know we're just verifying what, what we intuitively know, what our previous research has done.

Tim Rasinski :

But we need to continue to talk about this, this sort of issue, uh, and and validate it for ourselves. Uh, this is important. So studies are coming out. Um, actually, if I could, if I could, I'll talk about a study I'm going to be engaging in this fall, absolutely. You know well, most people who know about fluency know about the fluency norms. Jan has Hasbrook and Jerry Tindall created norms. They usually they go from first grade through eighth grade and you know, like you, melissa, what about ninth grade and 10th grade and 11th grade and 12th grade.

Melissa:

We've just looked at the eighth grade. We just looked at eighth grade.

Tim Rasinski :

Yeah. So what we're going to do is we're going to say well, what, what is the optimal rate of fluency to be a really good reader? And who are the really who are really good readers? We're going to define them as college graduates. So what we're going to do is we're going to find college graduates and, of course, if you work in a school, you're surrounded by college graduates, your colleagues and ask them to read a passage for us of maybe a couple passages or whatever. And you know, if we get, if we can get 200, 300 people reading for us, we get a pretty good idea of what that reading rate is for a college graduate.

Tim Rasinski :

Now, my guess is probably I don't know 160, 180 words correct per minute, somewhere in that neighborhood. But the consequence of that is not just what we know would be a ceiling. Once you get up to this level, you don't need to go beyond it, but it also provides us with a way of filling in the gaps. If we know what the eighth grade norm is and we know what the college graduate norm is, we can interpol, you know, make a pretty good guess of what should those in between levels should be. So hopefully, uh, this might give us some indication for you guys, you colleagues working in the secondary level, of what we should be aiming for in terms of those, those norms.

Tim Rasinski :

So yeah, that's amazing yeah, that's my plan for the fall, that's very exciting. Yeah, I might be calling you guys up to read for me.

Lori:

We can read for you. We owe you one Anytime, okay, well.

Tim Rasinski :

I'll count on it. In fact, if anybody's listening to this podcast, if you're interested come September or so, drop me a line and we can get on Zoom. I figure we can do most of this kind of research either in person or, you know, via zoom, like we're doing right now.

Lori:

Yeah, yeah, I'll, uh, I'll put your everything in the show notes and and information and links and stuff so I'll be able to contact you.

Melissa:

That'd be fun we can recruit for you, yeah.

Lori:

I feel like, though I mean to to just like stamp it and underscore this, like I shared with you. I have a daughter and share a little story about her earlier, but she is just finishing third grade and you know, I recently did the foundations intervention placement assessment with her, just to be like, hey, I need to just double check because make sure you're all good as you head forward into fourth grade, because make sure you're all good as you head forward into fourth grade, no, like zero intervention. You know she, with flying colors, passed that entire assessment, which would then have told me where she would have had deficits within any foundational skills, right.

Lori:

And then I listened to her read and if it's not all, as it's usually fairly accurate, but the automaticity and the expression needs some work and what?

Lori:

The one thing that has shown marked improvement has been the small chunks of the grade level texts about content that she's reading about in her core classes and that has been, you know, such a confidence builder for her because then she's learning vocabulary and she's able to use the vocabulary and it's usually repeated vocabulary and I know there's, you know, some morphology that comes into play in these pieces. So I just wanted to like stamp that with just like a little personal story to be like listen. You know even that fourth grade and we know that, like fourth grade on, they're supposed to be able to do this. But I'm sitting here saying my kid's a quote good reader. And if, even if I were, if I were not like a literacy person, I would, I would have no clue, right, and you know as so parents who are listening, if you're a parent like listen to your kid read, like list ask them to read aloud to you.

Tim Rasinski :

Yeah, no, you're. You're right, it's it. You know, as most parents would say, as long as my kid is reading the words correctly and knows what most of them mean, I'm happy, and you should be, of course. But that's not enough. You know the goal of phonics instruction is to get students not to use it. And what I'd like to know we should interview your daughter is in third grade. She finished third grade.

Lori:

Not yet. There's still a few more weeks, unfortunately over here but yeah, soon.

Tim Rasinski :

How much time was actually spent talking about those kinds of things, reading with expression, reading in chunks and phrases Well, I mean.

Lori:

I can answer that because we've been on virtual all year.

Tim Rasinski :

Okay.

Lori:

Not a lot, not a lot. So I've done a lot of that with her.

Tim Rasinski :

Yeah, yeah, but it's interesting that you mentioned the phrasing. That is a good indication of, of fluency. You know I forget who said this, but a quote I use often is the natural unit of reading is not the word, it's the phrase, the noun phrase, the verb phrase, the prepositional phrase. What does the word if mean? Or of O-F? You know by themselves. You know they're limited, so they've got to be part of a phrase For sure.

Tim Rasinski :

About 20 years ago I met one of my old heroes he's now passed away Edward Fry. Dr Ed Fry, he's the guy who came up with the sight words, or he calls them instant words. And I said you know, dr Fry, or I guess that's what I called him back then. You know it's great and teachers do a great job. What they do is they put these, your instant words, high frequency words, on a word wall and kids practice them and learn to say how about if we teach them as phrases In the water, by the car?

Tim Rasinski :

My mom and dad teach them that way. And he said that's a great idea. And so we actually worked together, collaborated on a program. Actually, on my website I have a collection of all 600 of Ed Fry's high frequency words written in the context of phrases, and I know teachers who find this, use them oftentimes, will get ahold of me and say you know, this is really cool, because not only are you teaching the high frequency words to students, but you're teaching them as as a chunk, as a phrase. So they're not doing. You know, in my house, it's in my house.

Lori:

Yeah.

Tim Rasinski :

Yeah, we, the people. So they're actually getting a twofer. They're learning the high frequency words, they're learning developing that sense of phrasing that you know is is, is really so important for, for, for all of us. Even when we speak we don't speak in word by word, except our robot speech.

Melissa:

But that's so funny because I I've given a lot of those one minute oral assessment or reading assessments this year, um, and sometimes when the students aren't using you know, reading in those phrases like I have a hard time following, even like, oh, yeah, yeah, 20th time I've heard this passage and I'm like wait, where are you?

Tim Rasinski :

Especially if it's a monotone, also because it's just yeah.

Melissa:

I mean, can you imagine how they're feeling reading it if I'm having trouble following along and I've heard the passage several times already?

Lori:

Yeah, yeah, that's a good point, melissa.

Tim Rasinski :

Reading is so much more complex, you know, than just reading the words.

Lori:

Yeah, there's so much, a lot of subtlety to it. Yeah, I want to go back to what I mentioned a moment ago, but we didn't really touch on. I mentioned morphology and I know that you have some little secrets you want to share in regard. Well, not secrets, because you post them on Twitter all the time, but can you tell us about? Morphology as a way to build vocabulary, Because I just I love listening to you talk about this.

Tim Rasinski :

Well, as I think I've mentioned in our earlier conversation, it went back to me in high school taking a course in Latin for four years, and, although I never got terribly good at it, what it actually did for me was it improved my English vocabulary, because what we know is that upwards of 90% of our multi-syllabic words are longer words, those words that your kids, melissa, engage in. 90% of those words are derived from Latin and Greek roots. Yet for a long time I really didn't. Although I knew there was something to this, I didn't really have the you know, the background or the expertise to do anything. It wasn't until I met a colleague of mine here at Kent State. His name's Rick Newton and his wife Evangeline. They're experts in this. Rick is the chair of the classics department at Kent State, and so we just started collaborating on this, and the point I simply want to make is that, you know, it's a great way of building vocabulary and the research has been getting to support it.

Tim Rasinski :

Nell Duke, in an Edutopia blog a couple years ago, she said she identified three literacy practices that actually work. Number one is morphology. Now, first of all, I probably should define what morphology is. It's basically, they're meaningful parts within words. You know we often talk about word families like A-C-K and I-N-G. You know, if you know those, you can figure out words like backtack, sack, sing, sting, swing and so on. Well, this is even better because if you know those, you can figure out words like backtack, sack, sing, sting, swing and so on. Well, this is even better because if you know some of these morphemes, like B-I as a pre-used, as a prefix, not only can it help you with the pronunciation but more importantly, it can help you with the meaning. It refers to two. So words like biplane, bifocals, biannualiannual biceps, bicuspids, and so on and so forth. So you're teaching one morpheme, one root. You can learn 10, 20, 30, in some cases over 100 english words uh, there, um, and then the other.

Tim Rasinski :

So what I've been doing for the past year, since the pandemic has been going on, is I do something on monday. I call it Morphology. Monday. I try to identify a root that is seasonal, and we do by create a little resource for teachers that can download it's. Usually you can find it on Twitter. So, for example, last week was Memorial Day. The root was M-E-M, which means mindful. Of course you see that in words like Memorial Day, but words like memory, memento, memorandum, memo. You know, many words are that Around Earth Day, I put up terra, t-e-r-r-a, which is Latin for earth, and we have words like subterranean, extraterrestrial, subterranean extraterrestrial, Mediterranean, terrestre, terrain, territory, terrarium, and on and on and on and on.

Tim Rasinski :

The idea is simply that you teach one route, you can learn a lot of words there and, as I mentioned earlier, the research is out there.

Tim Rasinski :

There's a study, not only Nel Duke endorsement, which is always good, but there's a study, not only not nel duke endorsement, which is always good, but there was a review study in the review of educational research a few years ago and they found that this is this approach to teaching vocabulary is very productive for building vocabulary comprehension, but not just for we often think of this for older kids, even elementary kids benefit from this, even um, and even, especially kids who struggle again. Uh, we're tapping into what I think is this natural um, into the natural proclivity I don't know if this is the right word or not proclivity. We have to see patterns. We have you know this needs to be something that is innate to human beings to see patterns in their environment, and what we're doing is just allowing you know, this needs to be something that is innate to human beings to see batteries in their environment, and what we're doing is just allowing, you know, helping kids see those patterns, well beyond just the word families, but the morphemes as well.

Lori:

And they get excited about it. I mean, I think they I know at least like reading different things with my daughter, like she learned phytoplankton in the beginning of the year and learned in context of a text and then she saw another word with that same phyto beginning I don't remember what word it was, but it was and she was so excited. She's like, oh, like you know, and she made a great guess of what the word might be based on that and the kids get excited because it's something that's familiar and they feel proud that they can do big things and read big words.

Tim Rasinski :

It gives them a strategy. Yeah, my colleague uh, in virginia, uh, hillary loftus, and so we already chatted. You're unrelated to her, but she does that she's. She's a middle school reading specialist and she uses the word toehold. She says it gives kids a toehold onto words they might not normally know. But just like your daughter there, yeah, if you know that a word starts with bi as a prefix, think two. Uh, it at least gives you, get you started, and you combine that with the context, you probably figure out the word. We know that.

Tim Rasinski :

Democracy, government of the people, right? Dim DEM, d-e-m means people. Okay, now let's switch that over to the word pandemic. Okay, pan means all or everything. Dem means people. Well, we're seeing that happen right now. Pandemic all the people, or a good number of them, are going to get sick and we're all of us at risk for being sick there. And then, of course, that turns into demographics, the study of people, and on and on and on and on. But yeah, it's been estimated that upwards of 90% of our academic vocabulary is drawn from Latin and Greek roots. So you know, if you want you, if you want to not only improve reading but also improve social studies, science, mathematics. This is a great way of doing it. So the kids can tap into some of those. You know those hard, more challenging words that they encounter in those academic words. If you know that poly means many, then polygon, many angles, and so on and so forth. I get started on this.

Lori:

I'm wondering if you have? Have you have any, I don't know studies or um information around teaching morphology in context? Does that matter?

Tim Rasinski :

I I always felt like, personally, when I learned it in context, I could remember it better which I think makes a lot of sense, but I just want to hear you talk about it and that's why, when I've been doing this morphology Monday, I've been trying to create the context. The context is the time of year, yeah, so birthday, let's work on Tara, uh, memorial Day and and so on and so forth. But you're, you're right, I think that's the way to do it. Um, you're reading something in context, you come across a word. Of course it's, you could do a little. Um, you know, teachable moment on that, but let's expand that teachable moment and help kids see all these other words that are derived from that. Uh, but, yeah, teaching them, and always only in isolation uh is, um, it is not as productive as as bringing into authentic reading with our kids not as productive as bringing into authentic reading with our kids.

Melissa:

Yeah, that makes sense. I just want to like put a stamp on what you said of like this is for our youngest kids, even you know, our K-1-2. And even I mean I was looking at Nell Duke's article and it's for specifically early elementary learners. Just because I often hear like well, we'll get to that after they master the phonics and decoding Right Like fourth grade fifth grade. This is first, then we'll get there.

Tim Rasinski :

Yeah, I have a colleague that is in the air neck of the woods, one of the DC suburbs in Virginia, fairfax County. I think her name is Joanne Newton and she she's, I think she's a reading specialist now, but she with primary grade uh teachers and they bring this in uh in their primary grades and it's pretty amazing. You know, they use a lot of the prefixes, all the words that have sub in them, all the words that have um, you know, pr, uh, um, pri, meaning before, and so on and so forth, but and they focus on one per week and the kids not only are seeing the words in isolation, but they're also reading passages that contain those. I've got an interesting study, if I, if you not study, but a little story I'd like to share with you. Yeah, it actually combines fluency.

Tim Rasinski :

Usually around uh november, late october, I work with kids and we anticipate veterans day. So what we do is we teach kids the songs of the military services and we either bring in some veterans or we go to the local VFW hall and do a little salute to veterans. Well, it turns out. Let's see. We are also working on the numerical prefixes UNI means one, bi means two, tri means three and so on. Well, it turns out, and we tell kids when you ever see these in your reading, point them out to us. So it just happened to me. We were singing the Marine song From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli and the kids had the text in front of them.

Tim Rasinski :

Well, second or third grader raised his hand Mr Rosensky, there's a triad in tripoli. What's it have to do with three? You know, it's just a city in libya and and I I should have taken an up on his question. I just kind of dismissed him because he went home, talked to his parents and he said well, let's, let's explore this. And they did. Tripoli, libya, is actually made up of two roots tri and poli. More commonly, it's polis. Polis, which means city like Indianapolis, minneapolis, metropolis, annapolis.

Melissa:

I hadn't even made that connection.

Tim Rasinski :

City of Ann. But so Tripoli was originally, was was originally three, three towns that combined to make one city called Tripoli. It comes back and he yells at me it does have something to do with that's. You know, that's what we were saying, how it becomes a vehicle, a strategy that the kids can use, and it doesn't work all the time, but, gosh, it works enough times that it makes it makes it certainly worthwhile well, and that that little guy was so curious, like that's what I think it prompts the curiosity and it helps him to.

Melissa:

It helps to forge the curiosity, you know, to transfer the knowledge from one to another absolutely absolutely yeah, it's like you're like cracking the code somehow, right like and it's not just the sound code, it's the meaning code.

Tim Rasinski :

Yeah, that's so fun when we know that so many of our words in english are derived from latin and greek, it just makes sense to at least spend a few minutes every day devoted to that yeah, so so far we've booked teachers for about 20 minutes a day between fluency and morphology.

Lori:

That's a good thing.

Tim Rasinski :

It's a good thing. That's a great thing. I wouldn't object to it. Yeah, I don't think you have to put a lot of time into fluency. 20 minutes per day, maybe 5 to 10 minutes on the morphology, it can take. You know, most of our time should be devoted to real reading, uh, but certainly time devoted to this. But again the thing, here's the thing with the morphology most teachers including myself, until I started with my colleague we don't have the background in this. We need to educate ourselves and develop our, our, uh, knowledge of this so that we can actually begin to apply it in our classrooms. We don't have to be PhDs in morphology, but we do need to understand. You know, just you know the connection between morphemes and any English vocabulary.

Lori:

I think you did a great job with a little intro session for any teachers or or leaders listening Like it. You hit the point home with some solid examples, I think.

Tim Rasinski :

Examples always work, don't they? Yeah, yeah, are we running out of time here?

Lori:

I know. Do you have a moment to talk about the thing that I don't want to put you over, but to talk about what you're working on now, or are you running to another meeting?

Tim Rasinski :

No, I'm not running to another meeting. I'll tell you what I'm going to do this fall. So you know I kind of switched between teaching, research and curriculum material development. Actually, one of the things I'm working on right now is with a poet. David Harrison is a highly regarded poet. He's won awards all over the country. He's from Missouri. Somehow we met and hit it off together. We're working along with Mary Jo Fresh from Ohio State, another colleague. We're creating a program. It's actually not a program itself, it's more just a supplemental material. It's called Partner Poems. So whatid is doing is he's writing poetry and they're built around word families. So this is kind of a phonics thing. Um, and they're they're meant to be read by two or three people. So it's a great way of getting kids to collaborate with one another. Or a teacher working individually with a child. Then mary joe is writing some instructional material that goes with it. And what I'm doing is I'm doing the word letters. We haven't had a chance to talk about the word letters.

Lori:

Oh, I know, I was hoping you'd bring them up.

Tim Rasinski :

I'm writing. I'm developing two word letters there Now. I'm sure that many of the people listening to this probably know about word letters, but if I can give you a one-minute thing, a word letter, and first of all I need to give a shout out to Isabel Beck and Pat Cunningham because they've been doing this for years and what I did was I do what all good teachers do you take somebody else's idea and you run with it. You tweak it.

Tim Rasinski :

A word ladder is simply a little activity where kids go create a series of words, one word after the next. Each word requires a one or two letter change in the previous word. So, for example, if I said let's start with the word hot, okay, change one letter in hot to make a word that is something you wear on your head. Change a letter in hat to make an animal that purrs, cat, and so on. So you see how it's done there. Now, the little tweak that I did is when I created these word ladders, the first word and the last word go together in some way, so it's a bit of a game. Okay, so, like dog to cat, dark to light and things like that. So it's a little game, but actually, if you take a close look at it in fact.

Tim Rasinski :

Isabel Beck published a study of this with her colleagues in scientific studies and reading found that first graders struggling first graders who did this on a regular basis in a single five-minute activity 10-minute activity demonstrated significantly greater improvement in phonemic awareness, spelling, phonics and comprehension. Even comprehension improved when compared with students who were in an alternative intervention. Isn't that amazing? Yeah, but if you think about it, what kids are doing is, when you're doing this, one word after next, you're happy. Okay, you have to. First of all, you got to think of the clue, so that's vocabulary. You got to think of okay, where does the sound change when I go from hat to cat? And then what letter represents that?

Tim Rasinski :

You're, what you're doing is what some people have called orthographic mapping. You really have to dig into the word itself. It's not just simply, you know, looking at the word and memorizing it. You're actually analyzing the word, but you're doing it in a fun, engaging way. I've heard from so many teachers around the country who have used this on a regular basis and again, it's more an observational comment than actual research, but so many are saying how much kids enjoy doing it but also seeing the improvement in spelling and vocabulary and word recognition. I often point out to teachers about games you know. Think of all the games that we play as adults, you know, and how many of the games are word games Scrabble, boggle all of them.

Melissa:

I love word games.

Lori:

Even like, if you like to play word games, even like crazy adult, like naughty adult games, if you will, are grounded in. You know what I mean. What's Cards Against Humanity? Sunny Ones? You know there are. They're all grounded in wordplay. Yeah.

Tim Rasinski :

And the point is if we like to do that, why wouldn't kids? Yeah. And yet what often happens in school is the games are only for reserve when the work's done. I what often happens in school is the games are only from reserve when the when the work's done. I think we should try to create a curriculum, word study curriculum, where it has a game like feel to it and certainly you know something like this. People have actually compared these word letters to crossword puzzles for kids.

Melissa:

Yeah.

Tim Rasinski :

Yeah, you know they're. They have those same many of the similar features of that for kids. So they're a lot of fun and even if kids did nothing else and they have fun, it'd be worth it. But here's the thing uh, do you ever notice that? Do you guys play uh words with friends? It's, you know okay, I've been off of it for a while, but it's travel on your phone.

Tim Rasinski :

Yeah, if, if you play it regularly, uh, one of the things that works with friends does it tracks your score, and I've done this with several people who are kind of do it all the time. Their score goes up all the time. You know, and, and you'd expect it, but I have to say we have a special name for it. When your score goes up, it's called learning. Right, when you get better at something, why not do this in school? You know you do it on a regular basis. Kids are going to get better at something. Why not do this in school? You know you can do it on a regular basis. Kids are going to get better at it and that's learning. You know kind of learning I want kids to have. You know that it's engaging and fun and and productive all at the same time, for sure, yeah, so it's what I call the art of teaching. You know, that's the challenge.

Melissa:

Yeah.

Tim Rasinski :

Yes.

Melissa:

Well, before we leave because we're running out of time, unfortunately is there anything else that you want to tell us about fluency or anything else that we just haven't mentioned today? Or this could be your piece of advice that you leave for our?

Tim Rasinski :

audience, just that. It's important. I hope that. You know I made a, you know, got you interested if you're not interested in fluency. And now would be a good time. You know, I don't know when you guys are going to actually post this, but I I hope hopefully early in the next week or so, but we're going into the summer months.

Tim Rasinski :

This would be a great time for teachers teachers to engage in some learning, learn more about morphology, learn about reading fluency. And, if I can plug myself, I have a website. Please do, tim Rosenskycom. If you look under resources, I have a lot of the articles that I've written. I just haven't posted there so they can be downloaded for free. Uh and um. So that's an easy way of getting material that's not going to cost you anything, and the articles are relatively short. Uh, if I have one talent, I I seem to be able to write in a relatively easy, understandable way. Uh, there, so that would be one thing.

Tim Rasinski :

You know, use the summer to learn and also to be creative. You know, if we talk about developing fluency and if you know, if anybody out there says, yeah, I'd like to try this thing where we do a weekly reader's theater script or we do a reader's weekly poetry slam. Well then, start collecting poetry this summer, right, and start perhaps writing your own. Put them all together that you might have once a week or once every two weeks. You could have something where your students would take a poem and rehearse it. You know you can't do this if on a Sunday night you say, oh, every one of my kids is going to have a poem tomorrow to rehearse. Yeah, you know, that's a little bit too late. Or think about writing scripts for Reader's Theater. I love writing Reader's Theater scripts.

Tim Rasinski :

One of the easiest things to do is to take a story you know and recast it as a script. So when students may perhaps read a story one of my favorite examples is the Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munch. We actually had students do this one they read the story, but then, when they read the story, they turned it into a script. They added dialogue and narration to the script and then they rehearsed it. I would argue that when you do things like that, you're engaging in an activity that's very authentic there are script writers in Hollywood that make a lot more money than us but also you have to understand the original text. If I'm taking, if I'm taking, you know, the introduction to hatchet by oh gosh, who just wrote that. I forgot Gary, gary.

Lori:

Paulson.

Tim Rasinski :

Yeah, that, that part where the plane crashes. If I turn that into a script, I have to have a deep understanding of that, the original story, to begin with. Or if I had to write my own version of a poem that's based upon, or write a poem that's a reflection of, a story I've read. Again, it requires deep understanding. It's not. It's more than just you know fluency, more than just writing. Yeah, so use the time in the summer to do some of that stuff.

Lori:

I'm thinking of so many examples and like connecting to it and just because Witten Wisdom is is like my bag, but, um, like in fourth grade, kids do read that text, um, by Gary Paulson. And so I'm thinking like, wow, that would be a great extension activity, like I can just see them pouring over that and or the teacher creating that. Or seventh grade students write a poem about identity after they read a poem about identity, and what a great way to help them in the very beginning of the year.

Lori:

you know, get, get into, I mean, an identity is a concept that takes them all throughout the year. So not only is it helping them to stamp the, the, to stamp the poem that they just wrote, and get that fluency, but also to really understand this concept, this very vague concept of identity that they're going to solidify throughout the year. So you're just making me think a lot about, like, how to attach it to what they're already doing. Or, you know, if they don't have materials that are of quality, then they're going to pull things in to to do just that like connect it, like you just shared. And I think it's just so meaningful for whoever's listening, whatever space they're in, whether they have, you know, great materials or maybe are heading and hoping to get great materials, or just have your website right they have access to stuff that's good stuff.

Tim Rasinski :

And also, if you like, you can throw my email address into the program notes. I do have that script by Gary Paulson based upon yeah, so if anybody wants it, send me.

Tim Rasinski :

I've got. Sojourner Truth Speech. Ain't I a Woman? I wrote this with some kids as a script, and of course that's perfect for Women's History Month or African-American History Month. I've got. I did a lot with speeches where I would read the Gettysburg Address yeah, that into a little script. And the scripts don't have to be terribly long, they're usually just two or three pages. But what you're doing is you're learning central content and developing all these other cross-curricular skills as well, competencies as well, yeah, so melissa, remind me, is it the when people go on?

Lori:

we just melissa, and I just realized this where can you not click on the links? Is it in the app or is it in on the website? It's on the website. It's on the Apple website. On a computer, you can't click on links on the app. On the app you can't write. On the app you can. Yeah, okay, so if you're listening and you're using Apple on your computer, go to the app on your go to the app to get the you'll get all the links.

Tim Rasinski :

We just discovered this. I just give it to you.

Lori:

I know We'll hyperlink them in, but it's just so interesting, because Melissa was like I thought we were hyperlinking everything in, but it's on my phone, but it's not on my computer. And then I was thinking well, gosh, we should say something on the podcast, because if people are trying to get, we look like we're lying, but we really are linking it.

Tim Rasinski :

Can I do this real quickly? Then we really are linking it. Can I do this real quickly? Then? My email address is T, as in Timothy, and then my last name, rosinski, without the I. Okay, t-r-a-s-i-n-s-k. At Kentedu, kent State. My Twitter is at TimRosinski1. Okay, that's easy enough, and then the website is TimRosinskicom. So there you go.

Lori:

Perfect. So now, if we're linked or not, you've got it. Yes, yeah. Thank you so much, it was such a treat getting to talk to you and thank you for all of the work that you continue to do.

Tim Rasinski :

It's been delightful. Thanks for inviting me, Lori and Melissa. It's really been fun. I enjoyed it Good.

Lori:

Thank you so much.

Melissa:

Yeah, thank Good. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Okay, look forward to it.