Fluency and Story Elements for Young Learners

Fluency is important.  Reading too slow or too fast will hinder comprehension.  In reality, fluency doesn’t guarantee that comprehension will happen.  However, comprehension is difficult without being a fluent reader.  As students move through each grade level, we want them to become stronger in analyzing and interpreting texts, be able to draw conclusions and infer meaning from the text.  In order to do all of this, we must focus on fluency.

I created this set of fluency component posters.  These posters define the different components of fluency- phrasing, rate, accuracy, and expression.

Fluency posters are FREE.

Teaching students the different story elements is important as well.  Knowing all the different parts of a story increases student’s ability to retell, summarize and comprehend the story.

Teaching these simple story elements begins early in school.   As soon as we build a foundation in these, we can move on to more complex topics.  Of course, we should always review and spiral through these as well.

For example, point of view, summarization, compare and contrast, and characterization are just a few we will introduce next.   We cannot build on these until we have a strong foundation in the simple story elements.

Teaching story elements is not a one-time thing.  We should discuss the elements of a story when we read books to our students or when we are discussing any type of text.  


Graphic organizers are one of my favorite ways to introduce and reinforce these elements.  Researchers support the use of graphic organizers in the classroom.  One of most favorite pieces of the research says that students process the information easily when in a graphic organizer because it is separated into chunks or pieced into organized parts.  Our brains like information when it is in organized parts.

Here is a view of the clipart.  I just love the artist who created the graphics for me.