Throughout school, a strong focus on teaching reading fluency is incorporated into the reading curriculum.  Fluency at Christ Church is progressive and we ensure children are fluent at each stage of their reading journey before progressing to their next level.

Through direct teaching, our systematic synthetic phonics program ensures children can decode quickly and accurately whilst giving children the opportunity to re-read books.  Decodable books they take home allow children to practice their blending and grapheme-phoneme correspondences they know so confidence in reading and fluency is quickly developed.

Children that need extra practice in fluency are identified throughout school.  These children may receive additional small group intervention or one-to-one support.

The 6Ps of Reading Fluency

We use the 6Ps—Pause, Power, Pace, Punctuation, Passion, and Pitch—to help children become expressive, fluent readers:

• Pause: Teaches children to stop at punctuation, improving comprehension and flow.
• Power: Encourages confident, clear reading with appropriate volume and emphasis.
• Pace: Helps children read at a steady speed—neither rushed nor too slow.
• Punctuation: Guides expression and meaning; children learn to respond to punctuation marks.
• Passion: Builds emotional connection to the text, making reading engaging and meaningful.
• Pitch: Develops voice variation to reflect mood, character, and tone.

Children throughout school are familiar with these strategies and they are visible on classroom reading boards.  

Fluency Lessons

Our fluency lessons consist of eight key components structured to target children’s reading fluency through successful decoding practice and repeated reading.  Children observe the modelling of fluent reading and explicitly practice it.

Contextualise:

The teacher explains the upcoming reading in a wider context, providing background knowledge and developing cultural capital.  

Unfamiliar vocabulary:

The teacher pre-teaches up to five pieces of vocabulary, focusing on fluent pronunciation (supplemented with a definition and image). This aims to ensure that word recognition difficulties do not interrupt fluent reading, by supporting those children who would otherwise struggle to decode or understand the meaning of new or complex words.

Modelled fluent reading:

The teacher models high quality fluent reading, bringing the text to life through varied expression, volume, pace and use of gestures, facial expressions and movements as appropriate and providing an opportunity for pupils to hear someone else provide a good model of what expressive fluent reading sounds like. Our 6Ps (pause, passion, pitch, punctuation, power, pace) of fluency are used.

Text marking / phrased reading:

The teacher demonstrates breaking an excerpt of text down into phrases or units of meaning using text marking and phrased reading. They draw attention to the role of punctuation as a phrase marker. Teachers then support children to work in pairs to mark the rest of the text. This involves indicating on their texts when a phrase ends and identifying whether there should be a short or long pause. It also includes identify words that are emphasised for expression or read as a chunk.

Echo reading:

Echo reading builds on fluent modelling and involves the teacher reading a section of text and pupils ‘echoing’ it back in chorus, mirroring the same intonation and expression.

Paired reading:

In paired repeated reading, children practice repeatedly reading the passage aloud in pairs. They give and receive feedback using our 6Ps, making their awareness of different aspects of fluency in their own and others’ oral reading explicit.

Reading for performance:

In performance reading, children read aloud to the class with an emphasis on communicating the reading of the text through fluent reading. This might be done through choral reading (where the whole class reads the text together fluently), or grouped, individual or paired choral reading (where smaller groups or individuals read aloud to the class).

Questioning:

Discuss the context of the text with the children. This is likely to involve a small number of questions being asked about the text and some explanation if necessary.