Creating Fluent Readers through Endurance

Fluency is defined by four major components: accuracy, rate or speed, prosody, and comprehension--but one very important concept is left out in much research about fluency: endurance.  What I gathered from the One-Minute-Measures was that they seem to be very similar to standardized testing, which is a controversial topic in the education arena today, but if it is used correctly it can create huge results and can be very beneficial to a teacher.  The article emphasized, it is extremely important for us as teachers to understand WHY students are not fluent readers.  What I found most interesting about the "One Minute Measure" article was the assessment of endurance.  After all, endurance is something that we are all familiar with and I think it is also something that many elementary students could relate to, especially considering that reading is something very new to many of them, and getting the hang of it will take much patience and endurance.  Some suggestions for incorporating fluency and endurance were increasing atomicity, decreasing readability levels, reading interesting texts, increasing reading volume, increasing expectations, rereading books, and increasing involvement of parents and caregivers.

 Fluency has been proven to be a major factor in student reading success.  The second article emphasized the importance of students hearing what fluent reading sounds like.  I think that one of the most difficult things about becoming a teacher is remembering that reading fluency is something that is learned, and as teachers it is our responsibility to equip students with the proper skills to learn to read fluently and be comfortable in a reading environment.  Both articles suggest that teachers use assisted reading and repeated reading.  How do you think a class would respond to reading the same book over and over? A few weeks ago I observed a classroom where repeated reading was implemented and the students became bored of the book and they were very reluctant to pay attention and follow along.  Can you think of any way that you could make repeated reading fun while also improving students reading fluency?