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Reading smoothly, not word by word
Can do: Reads a familiar Grade 1 text at around 50–60 words a minute, in phrases, with expression.
Why it matters
Comprehension runs on leftover capacity. A child spending everything on decoding has nothing left to understand with — which looks exactly like a comprehension problem.
What it looks like when it's wobbly
Robot reading, one word at a time; ignores full stops; can decode every word but cannot say what the page was about.
⏱️ Two-minute check
Pick a book they've read before. Time one minute and count the words read correctly.
Solid looks like: Around 50 or more by mid-year, 60 by June, with pauses at the punctuation.
The full activity for this topic · 10 minutes
Read It Three Times
- 1First read: slow, working it out, you help with anything stuck for more than three seconds.
- 2Second read: same page, faster. Count the words and write the number down.
- 3Third read: with expression, as a character. Silly voices are legitimate technique.
- 4Compare the numbers. Improvement on the same page is the whole point — never compare to another child.
- 5Finish by reading it to somebody else: a sibling, a grandparent on the phone, the dog.
If it's too hard
You read a sentence, they read it straight back — echo reading carries the phrasing for them.
If it's too easy
Read a page with dialogue and give each character a different voice, which forces attention to the punctuation.
Say this
"Now read it like you're talking, not like you're working it out. Stop where the dot is."