As the days get longer and the flowers start to bloom, it’s time to dust off those reading passages and dive head-first into springtime learning! If you’re looking for a great way to help your elementary students improve their reading fluency, look no further than the “Save the Bees” spring reading passages. With four grade levels of engaging stories and ELA Choice Board activities, you can not only improve student reading but also work on essential writing skills, too!
Let’s take a look at what these fun reading passages have to offer.
Daily Reading Fluency Routines
The “Save the Bees” spring reading passages are designed to provide a daily reading fluency routine that will improve student accuracy, rate, and expression. Each passage keeps your students engaged and wanting more. Plus, each passage is accompanied by an activity page with comprehension questions, the author’s purpose, genre writing prompts for opinion, informative and narrative writing practice, sentence expansion, and more!
The “Why” for Using the Spring Reading Passages
Reading fluency is important because it builds a bridge between word recognition and reading comprehension. Students must learn to read and understand words not just accurately but also effortlessly or automatically.
If you’d like a brief history of reading fluency, I have linked this document you can read.
Daily Reading Routine Using the Spring Reading Passages
1. Begin the week with the teacher introducing the vocabulary words and reading aloud the most advanced level of text.
2. Each day of the week, ask students to read the text while you are timing them for one minute. Record a slash after the last word read at the end of the minute. Any mistakes or “told” word is circled. Each day, the correct word count per minute is (wpm) recorded. The goal is to increase the word count by Friday. Use a Reading Fluency Goal chart for goal setting.
3. Record the total words read correctly on a Reading Fluency Tracker. The intention is for each student to set and track individual reading fluency goals with each reading.
4. Celebrate ALL student success. Even one more word read correctly is considered a win. By the end of the week, the student improvement is incredible! Not to mention what happens after a month or year of keeping consistent with the routine.
Trust me, it’s such exciting stuff!
ELA Choice Board Activities
The included ELA Choice Board activities extend the learning in fun ways that allow your students to explore their individual interests while still reinforcing essential language art standards. You will see various skills for reading, grammar, writing, and creativity options for the students.
Spring Reading Passages Activities
- Write a Review of the Text
- Sentence Expansion Practice
- Grammar- circle punctuation, one underline under nouns, two underlines under verbs
- Author’s Purpose-Identify and short response
- Quiz- 4 question multiple choice
- Vocabulary Practice
- Constructive Response-Short Answer
- Narrative Writing Prompt
- Opinion Writing Prompt
- Informative Writing Prompt
- Create a book cover for the text
- Daily reading of the text
Why You Should Include Student Choice
Offering student choice in lessons has been shown to increase student engagement, motivation, and ownership of learning. With student choice boards, teachers can provide an element of student control over the material they learn while still controlling the overall direction of the lesson.
Student choice boards come with various options for students to choose from. The student choice boards have engaging materials for students, and they also give teachers valuable insight into student learning preferences that can be used to personalize instruction in the future.
Furthermore, student choice helps foster a sense of ownership within their academics by allowing them to create their own lesson activities based on their interests and needs.
This spring season is the perfect time for your students to get buzzin’ over some exciting new reading material! With the “Save the Bees” Spring Reading Passages, you can provide your elementary-aged learners with engaging stories full of detailed descriptions and creative activities that extend learning in fun ways.
So don’t wait – let’s get our students buzzing about these fabulous springtime reads!
Melissa
An Added Note
To learn more about teaching elementary students basic writing skills, let me suggest checking out my E-book entitled Sentences, Paragraphs, and Essays: OH, MY!
Not only does it provide you with more in-depth information on how to teach basic writing skills, but it also provides you with a daily routine and editable templates needed for student success.
Use these templates repeatedly throughout the school year. All you need is to pop in a new writing prompt or subject.
Plus, I’ve included built success with scaffolded instruction and routine. These are two key elements to truly teaching the basic skills of writing, which lead to strong, skilled writers.
You may be able to tell that I believe the beauty of learning lies within a routine. Read this blog post if you’d like to learn more about my Paragraph Writing Routine.
