Reading fluency begins with sound fluency. It's where decoding symbols into sounds and thus words begins. In STEP 4, students are introduced to the sounds as they write the letters of the alphabet.

When a child writes the letter A, he or she should be thinking the sounds for A. You want that symbol to trigger those sounds.

Some sounds have spelling rules associated with them. For instance, click here to hear the sound and rule for the AI phonogram. They'll need all that for spelling choices, but for reading fluency, the ability to decode at lightening speed, they need just the sound for AI.

This process begins with learning the blue cards, the 26 letters of the alphabet, and quickly follows with learning the green cards, the elementary set of multi-letter phonograms. Students learn the whole phonogram, rules and all, but practice for speed "reading" the cards with only the sounds.

Click here to watch a teacher flashing green cards for fluency practice.

Once sounds are on their way to automatic, students learn to blend sounds together to make words. We begin building blending fluency in STEP 5 with
blending nonsense words.

When students begin spelling words in STEP 8, fluency broadens to include word fluency as students work to put the words they are building into their sight word vocabulary. In STEP 9, students use their STEPS logs for fluency practice. Watch as this older student, works to read his Log page for word fluency.

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