English Language Development

Snapshot 6.4. River Systems in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India

Integrated ELA/Literacy and World History Lesson in Grade Six (cont.)

Additional Information

• California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery. Education and the Environment Initiative.
  “California Education and the Environment Initiative Curriculum.” http://www.californiaeei.org/curriculum/

Content knowledge, as are all the themes, is supported by wide reading. Teachers should plan a
program of independent reading that encompasses literature, literary nonfiction, and nonfiction. See
the section on wide reading and independent reading in chapter 2 and in the overview of the span in
this chapter.

Foundational Skills

Ideally by the time students enter grade six, their knowledge
of foundational skills is well established. They have a large base
of sight words, and they rapidly and effectively employ word
recognition skills to identify new printed words. Fluency, which
includes accuracy, rate, and prosody, continues to develop as
students engage in wide and extensive reading. Rate of reading
varies, however, as it should, with the text and the task. Based
on an extensive study of oral reading fluency, Hasbrouck and
Tindal (2006) recommend that students scoring more than 10
words below the 50th percentile receive additional instruction
that targets fluency. (See figure 6.13.)

Figure 6.13. Mean Oral Reading Rate of Grade Six Students

Percentile Fall WCPM* Winter WCPM* Spring WCPM*

Avg. Weekly

Improvement**

90

75

177

153

195

167

204

177

0.8

0.8

50 127 140 150 0.7

25

10

98

68

111

82

122

93

0.8

0.8

*WCPM = Words Correct Per Minute **Average words per week growth

Source

Hasbrouck, Jan, and Gerald A. Tindal. 2006. “Oral Reading Fluency Norms: A Valuable Assessment Tool for

Reading Teachers.” The Reading Teacher 57: 646-655.

Fluency rates should be cautiously interpreted with all students. See the discussion of fluency in
the overview of the span in this chapter and the section on supporting students strategically. The
primary way to support students’ fluency is to ensure accuracy in decoding and engagement in wide,
extensive reading of texts that are neither too simple nor too challenging. In addition, students should
have authentic reasons to reread text because rereading also supports fluency.

564 | Chapter 6 Grade 6