Teaching your child to read fluently is one of the key components for children to master to become successful learners. Echo reading is a reading strategy designed to help students develop expressive, fluent reading as well as used for decoding words. In echo reading, you read a short section of text, sometimes a few words, a sentence or short paragraph, and the student echoes it back to you mimicking your voice and inflections as they read along. Echo reading is great for beginning and struggling readers to learn how the words are pronounced and flow together.
Since echo reading can be used to develop both decoding words and fluency it is a great practice to get in the habit of with your child. It is important when using echo reading for decoding words that you make sure to use pointing when reading so students can gain the letter to print concept.
How to echo read:
Select a book. Short books to start and you can move to longer texts as they grow.
First read the entire book modeling what a fluent reader would sound like and do.
Then models fluent reading of a short segment, usually one sentence.
Next the student repeats or echoes the segment you just read.
Read the next sentence and have your child echo… repeat until done.
REMEMBER TO ALWAYS POINT WHEN READING