Reading fluency- reception

[Noodlenation]

Hello, my daughter is currently in reception she’s on red reading level. She reads fine and decodes well but is robotic and slow especially when breaking down the words. Basically there is no fluency therefore she has trouble with comprehension.

We have two stories before bedtime where I read to her. She has two books from school once a week which she reads to me I also get a load of red reading level books from the library. So we can read one everyday.

so im doing the most I can with her, but is there any particular tips that can help with fluency. Any tricks that I’m missing? Google just says reread again and again, but she hates reading the book more than once.
please any advice appreciated.
thanks

Sounds like you and her are doing great and shes doing well for a reception child! It will click just keep doing what you're doing and dont add any pressure on you or her x

It’s really early days. If she can decode and blend, and enjoys listening to other stories being read to her, the fluency will come.

Reading isn't just for books. It's about communication.
Ask the grandparents , aunts and uncles to send her a letter or postcard with messages. Buy her some postcards and stamps to reply.
Have a chalk board in the kitchen and leave little messages to her; or the dinner menu. Let her write messages too.
Play hangman.
When you're out and about on foot, point out words and names ; like "TESCO",

Cinema. .The destination on the bus; the names on the supermarket aisles, road names, public notices "DO NOT FEED THE DUCKS" etc.

Children learn to read at different rates. There is also a ceiling on reading age so once there you're there iyswim?

I think the most important thing is you're reading with her and helping her foster a love of books and reading. And if she only likes to read a book once - that's fine. It's about the exposure as much as the learning at this age.

My DS hated reading books more than once. However, for some reason he was absolutely fine re-reading words on home made flash cards. I printed out various words from the 100 high frequency word lists and cut them into individual rectangles. We had a pile of about 8 he'd go through once a day. I picked a few key irregular ones and as well as ones he could sound out. He rapidly got faster at sounding them out and then eventually started being able to read them fluently. Once he could sight read a word, I swapped it out.

Oh yes! I forgot to mention that. She likes doing flash cards. Do they have to decode sight words? We just read them as they are. So she knows most by memory. Don’t know if that’s correct. Conflicting info online as to what’s right or wrong.

For my reception child if it seems like she’s not really understanding the story I have her decode each word then I reread the whole sentence, pointing to each word as I go. Then we might have a little chat about the picture or what we think might happen next, or how you would feel in that scenario etc before we read the next page.
DH and I also take turns reading with her, so she’ll read her book to me one day and then him the next, which seems to help with some of the less frequently used words.
Also, I don’t know which books your school use, ours have a mixture of schemes, but I prefer the ‘jelly and bean’ ones to the dandelion reader ones.

When rereading books, trying taking turns or reading some parts together.
‘Sight words’ can be decoded but many include sounds that she won’t have met yet. It’s fine to memorise them as they appear so often in texts and will help her to become more fluent. However, there is a limit to how many words we can just remember which is why we need phonics too. She might enjoy a game called Popcorn which rehearses these common sight words.
Hope that helps.

We have a similar issue (September birthday reception child) where she can decode, and sometimes 'Fred in her head' as she calls it, but then struggles to put the sentence together.

We tend to read each page of a phonics book a few times, going faster each time until it flows. BUT she has days where she doesn't have the patience for it and I just let her read individual words to me and then I read the whole story after.

I feel my age when I think 'we didn't have any of this in my day, we just memorised whole words and figured the rest out for ourselves'.

I’m a Reception teacher of several years and this is a great approach - reading over the sentence once it’s been decoded, and then discussing it, or asking a related question about the pictures. Sight words are also great to speed things up a bit. Sounds like she’s doing great. Keep going!

One of the aims with phonics is to get to the point they can see a word and blend it in their head, and say it as a whole. As an example, you probably sight read a made up word like 'vight' - they need to be able to do the same with simple real words to be fluent because at this stage of reading every book will have new words in.

I'm not sure whether you are using 'sight words' to mean phonically irregular words (like the) - those yes you can learn by sight / do a combination of decoding / learning the irregular bits. As well as the irregular ones, there are also ones like 'look' which they can sound out. Those I used to practice sounding out on. Linked to the sounds that were coming up in their reading books, I'd then add flashcards for more words with the same sound in that they were coming across in their reading (e.g. in this case 'cook', 'book', 'moon', 'soon' etc). We'd practice sounding them out every day until fluent. As DC wouldn't reread, it was a way of getting that repeated practice of sounding out key words in.

DD is also in Reception and I also used to read over the sentence once read slowly by her when she was in earlier stages. Likewise with discussion around the story, pictures and comprehension. Her school do not allow them to move up book bands until they are certain of comprehension at each level and they are assessed on this at school.

I'll be honest, I do not have a clue on teaching phonics vs sight words. I know some posters on here are very particular on the phonics method but she was already reading before I discovered this. School teach phonics and test her on spellings but she has been able to read the words she is currently learning at school for a while. She is able to read and enjoys books, I consider that a win and am not concerned at all about the method in which we got here

My DD is in reception (July born). She also only likes reading books once. I have convinced her that her teacher has said she has to read the school ones twice. So she reads it once with me and once with DH.
We talk about the pictures and story as we go along, guessing what might happen next. She spends a long time looking at the picture before she will start reading. It drives me a bit mad but I guess it helps her once she starts reading the sentence so I try to exercise as much patience as possible!
She has just gone up to yellow at school. I get a mixture at home from the library. I was still getting pinks up until very recently. She would read a pink by herself then read it to me. This really helped with fluency. By the time she read it to me she pretty much just read it through without much sounding out. I am trying to get her to do this with the reds now but she is a bit less enthusiastic at the minute. With the harder books she decodes it word by word and then I read the sentence in full, I try to do voices for the characters/appropriate enthusiasm, sadness etc. to make it more interesting.
She definitely has peaks and troughs in how interested she is. She will also have a sudden click and improve massively.