Why poetry is the fastest route to reading fluency (and the routine we're trying)

Gareth McGovern, our Year 2 lead, and I have been trying to crack reading fluency for the best part of a year. Some of what we have ended up with came directly from reading Tim Rasinski. Some of it came from a webinar with him that I sat in on a few months ago. Most of it came from trying things in classrooms and seeing what stuck. What follows is the routine we have settled on, the research that sits behind it, and an invitation to try it with us.

Why poetry, and not something else

Most fluency practice goes wrong at the level of text choice. If the text sits at the edge of a child's decoding, there is no headroom left for prosody. The child reads carefully, word by word, and the meaning arrives flat. The fluency we want, the kind that supports comprehension, never has a chance to surface. Rasinski's point about appropriate text difficulty applies as much to poetry as to anything else. The text has to be well within reach.

Poetry has three advantages once the difficulty question is settled. Poems are short enough to learn in a week. Their rhythm is part of the form, not something a teacher has to impose on it. And they are written to be read aloud, so a child can return to the same poem for five days without anyone wondering why. That last point matters more than it sounds, because repeated reading is what fluency teaching depends on.

This is not a new observation, even if it has dropped out of UK primary practice. Rasinski and his colleagues built the Fluency Development Lesson around exactly this idea. Their 1994 study in the Journal of Educational Research (Rasinski, Padak, Linek and Sturtevant) followed urban second-grade readers through a routine of repeated reading using short performance texts. The students made significant gains in oral reading rate. The texts were poems, monologues, dialogues, speeches. Anything worth reading aloud more than once.

The lesson took fifteen to twenty minutes and included teacher modelling, echo reading, choral reading, and partner reading of the same text. The text was chosen because it was short enough to be re-read until it became smooth, and rich enough to reward the repetition. Later adaptations of the FDL stretched the routine across a week, with the same text revisited in different formats day by day (Zimmerman and Rasinski, 2012). That week-long structure is what most modern fluency practice descends from. It is also where our routine started.

The Ofsted picture

In March 2024, Ofsted published Telling the story, their English subject report from 50 inspected schools. Two findings sit beside each other in the report and are worth reading together.

The first is that schools are "unsure how to build fluency and comprehension well", and that in some schools the main approach to fluency improvement is exam-style comprehension questions, which the report explicitly notes "does not build pupils' reading fluency".

The second is that "playscripts and poetry are neglected" in current primary practice.

These two findings are connected. Schools struggling to teach fluency are also the schools that have lost the texts that teach it most efficiently. The pendulum has swung towards prose, towards the next age-appropriate chapter book, towards comprehension worksheets. Poetry has been quietly relegated to the National Poetry Day display board.

I do not think this is a deliberate choice by any teacher. It is what happens when timetables tighten and curriculum maps fill up. Poetry feels like an enrichment. Fluency feels like the urgent problem. The two have been separated when they should have been the same lesson.

The routine we are trying

Gareth and I built the week around a single poem. One poem, taught properly on day one, then practised in five-minute warm-ups on the following days. The teacher's role fades through the week. The children's role grows. We are not the first people to structure a fluency week this way, but the version below is ours, refined as we have gone.

Day one is the taught lesson, around twenty-five minutes. The teacher performs the poem in full, expressively, while the children listen. They do not read along. They need to hear what the poem sounds like before they decode a word of it. Then a short discussion of meaning, partner talk on how the poem should sound, and finally a "my turn, your turn" echo read line by line.

Day two is a five-minute echo warm-up. Children try the whole poem cold, then the teacher patches the wobbly lines with expression and gets the class to echo them back.

Day three is choral reading. The whole class reads the poem aloud in one voice. Less fluent readers are carried by the group. The teacher then adds one focus: landing the rhymes, or pausing on the punctuation, or whatever the poem deserves.

Day four is partner reading. Children read the whole poem to a partner. The partner offers one specific, kind tip. The reader has another go and then they swap.

Day five is performance. Children perform the poem to an audience. A partner, a group, the class. Voices, actions, drama encouraged. The performance is what the whole week has been building towards, and it is the bit that children remember.

The one rule we hold to is that the teacher always models the poem in full before the children read it. Children cannot read with expression they have never heard. The temptation to jump to "my turn, your turn" first is real, especially when time is tight. Resist it. The performance and the partner talk on how the poem should sound have to come first.

What we think is working, and what we are still figuring out

The same text becomes easier each day without becoming boring, because repetition in the presence of an audience is rehearsal, not drudgery. Children practise because they are going to perform. The fluency the teacher modelled on Monday has somewhere to go by Friday.

The children who struggle most seem to benefit most. A struggling reader cannot fake their way through a longer prose text on their own, but they can absolutely be carried by a choral reading on Tuesday, hear their own voice improve on Thursday, and stand up on Friday alongside their peers. The data I wrote up in an earlier post suggests this is the pattern in practice. The children we worried about most have made the biggest gains.

What we have not yet worked out: how to select poems consistently well (some look right on paper and die in the classroom), how to keep the routine fresh when you have used it for ten weeks, and how to evidence prosody gains without it becoming subjective. These are the things we will keep adjusting.

The routine, free, for you to try

The Poem of the Week routine is written up as a one-page planning document. The five days, the five steps for day one, the timings, and the one rule that holds it together. It is what we are using at our school right now.

Download it here. I am asking for an email address in exchange because I want to know who is trying it, hear how it works in your classroom, and send you a short note in a few weeks asking what would make it better. The next version of this routine will be shaped by what teachers tell me. Wild Wednesday subscribers will already have a copy in their inbox.

If you want to start somewhere this week, choose one poem. Short enough to learn. Strong enough to perform. Then give it a week, and let me know how you get on.

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References

Rasinski, T.V., Padak, N.D., Linek, W.L., & Sturtevant, E. (1994). Effects of fluency development on urban second-grade readers. Journal of Educational Research, 87, 158-165.

Zimmerman, B., & Rasinski, T.V. (2012). The fluency development lesson: A model of authentic and effective fluency instruction. In T.V. Rasinski, C. Blachowicz, & K. Lems (Eds.), Fluency instruction: Research-based best practices (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Ofsted (2024). Telling the story: the English education subject report. Available at gov.uk.

Rasinski, T.V. (2010). The Fluent Reader. Scholastic.