Rewards is a program that is a precursor to being fluent. Rewards teaches students the phonemic awareness they will need to read more fluently. Students who have a reading rate that is below grade level expectations benefit from the extra phonics practice that is offered by the Rewards program.
Upon completion of the Rewards program, students graduate into the Six Minute Solutions program. This program focuses solely on increasing students' reading rate. Students are given reading passages at their reading level and are timed for one minute. Prior to their first reading, students are informed of how to pronounce difficult or unfamiliar words. Students read the same passage for four consecutive days, graphing the results, before moving on to a new passage. There is no comprehension piece associated with Six Minute Solutions.
As students increase their reading rate, they can then begin to participate in the Read Naturally program. Read Naturally provides continued timed reading practice, but it also incorporates comprehension. So students begin to combine the skills of reading fluently while understanding. In Read Naturally, students are given a passage at their reading level and are asked to write a prediction about the story prior to reading. Students are also introduced to five new vocabulary words that will appear in the passage. Upon reading the story, students have four multiple choice comprehension questions to complete and one short answer. Teachers have the option of assigning a retell as well, where students write as much about the story as they can remember. Students read the same passage for five days, graphing the first day in blue to signify a cold read, and the last day in read, signifying a hot read, meaning after multiple practices.
Dibels is a reading fluency program that many school districts use to assess their students' reading fluency. There are benchmark reading goals for each grade level making it easy to identify where a student is at in terms of grade level expectations. In Dibels, students read three separate passages, each for one minute, and the middle score of the three timed readings is recorded as the students' reading rate. Students are marked down for reading through punctuation, mispronouncing a word or mixing up the order of words, but they are not penalized for adding words to the passage as this naturally slows down their rate. In the younger grades, K-3, students also have a retell component as well.