How the Program Works

This program is for teaching a narrow but important range of skills in reading: Fluency and inflection, mostly.

Here's how it works:

• The student has a paragraph to read.
• She listens to a recording of someone reading the paragraph with fluency and feeling. She listens several times, reading along as she goes.
• She practices on her own until she feels she's ready to try reading it with that same fluency and feeling.
• She signals to an adult, then tries reading the paragraph out loud.
• The teacher asks: "Was that excellent?" The student gives a self-evaluation. If the adult and student agree, the student gets the okay (a stamp or a sticker) and the student moves on to a new paragraph.
• Eventually, the students completes a whole packet in this way.

Right now, this program is done with printed packets and cheap mp3 players. In the future, however, there would be some great benefits to having the library of readings and recordings in a web page. For instance:

• We can track students' progress through the passages and share their progress online.
• We can easily add new texts, including paragraphs from books the students are interested in.
• We could record students' readings and build a library searchable by student, passage or keyword.