After-School Programming and Intrinsic Motivation by Elaine Clanton Harpine

Author:Elaine Clanton Harpine
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030228453
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Teaching Technique #11: Puppet Plays

Many students struggle with reading fluency. Schools often teach that fluency is about the speed with which you read. Children are often timed while they read, and sometimes parents are even encouraged to time their children as they read at home. Unfortunately, reading fluency has absolutely nothing to do with how fast you can read (Shaywitz, 2003). Shaywitz and Shaywitz (2007) report from their research that timing children can even be harmful. Instead, reading fluency is how smoothly and accurately the child reads, and whether the child understands and can comprehend what they have read (Wolf & Katzir-Cohen, 2001). Shaywitz (2003) states that repetition, rereading the same oral passage over and over is the best way to teach reading fluency. Fluency training should start the minute children begin learning to read.

Unfortunately, most children do not want to sit and read the same story over and over. To fill this need, I incorporated puppet plays into our program design. Children read and practice reading a puppet play skit to present during their make-believe TV show, and they will eagerly reread the same skit several times to practice and be ready for the show. So, puppetry became a fun way to help children practice fluency, grammatical sentence structure, reading with emphasis and expression, and conveying ideas to an audience (see chapter 2). For an audience to be able to understand what the children were saying, the children often had to speak more slowly rather than seeing how fast they could read. Puppet plays fit perfectly into the intrinsic motivation design and brought parents and family in at the end of the session to witness the children’s weekly improvement and accomplishments.

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