Fluency with Hameray Publishing

In today’s classroom, there is a lot of focus on fluency! Children are supposed to be able to read to us as if they were talking to us. So we begin in the primary grades to focus on fluency using easy text.

In my room, I wanted my children to read fluently but not just fiction books. I wanted them to read nonfiction books as well. This is why I love the ZooZoo series by Hameray Publishing!

This series have a nonfiction section as well as a storytellers section. This allows us to bring in various texts that will peek their interests and ones that we can use during our guided reading groups as well.

The books we read were Zebras, Oh Zebra, Frog and Frogs Play.

As usual, we began by reviewing the vocabulary! Each book had some awesome words to review with my kids! I love having my kids come up with synonyms for the vocabulary words. They always surprise me with their ability to inference! I will review vocabulary two ways: just give them the word and allow them to try on their own and then build on to what they are saying or I will use the word in a sentence and have them use their context clues to figure out the meaning!

I love using fiction and nonfiction books together. It allows them to compare and contrast. They are also able to tell the difference in fiction and nonfiction using the texts as examples. These are common core standards in First Grade.

So before we read the fiction books, the kids made inferences! They looked at the cover and told me what they thought would happen. We would then read the stories to see if their inferences were correct.

With the nonfiction stories, they shared all that they thought they knew about the animal. We completed can, have, and are charts using the nonfiction texts.

The text in both the fiction and the nonfiction books  were perfect for my small group and my low readers! But all of my kids gravitate towards these books! They love the pictures and the easy to read text!

As I read the text to them, I stop and ask them questions. I also allow them to ask questions and to talk with a partner throughout the book.

I love these pages!!!!!!!!! Look below and click on the picture for the link to the series!

The Nonfiction Texts

The Fiction texts

I love how we can compare and contrast the two series. That is a common core standard for first grade. Comparing and contrasting two texts about the same topic. But we could also compare the texts against each other frogs and zebras. They were able to discuss the differences in environments and storylines as well as diet and life cycles.

 After we discussed the books we then completed some activities! The pages that we completed are below!  click on photos for link to worksheets

Have an awesome day!