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Wilson Reading System® Resource

Wilson Fluency® | Basic

Supplement your reading curriculum with explicit fluency instruction.

Developing decoding skills with connected text

Students who struggle to read fluently need a lot of practice. Wilson Fluency® | Basic supplements your reading curriculum by providing additional reading practice with explicit fluency instruction. This program provides emerging readers with fluency practice at a student’s instructional reading level. It is appropriate for both younger students with beginning reading skills or for older students who are not reading fluently due to decoding deficits.

Program highlights

  • Phonetic and high frequency word practice to improve accuracy and automaticity 
  • Controlled, short phrases with taught-word patterns and high frequency/sight words
  • Longer phrases, presented in meaningful chunks to develop prosody, containing both taught and untaught elements 
  • Practice with a phrased version of a story followed by the unphrased passage to further develop phrasing and expression  
  • Comprehension instruction incorporated from the beginning, with students asked to retell each story to monitor comprehension 
  • Practice with enriched and decodable passages to enhance listening and reading comprehension, and vocabulary 
  • Non-controlled, decodable passages in the Basic Reader to help students begin to transfer their emerging decoding skills to reading authentic text with support and success 
  • Assessment tools to measure student rate, accuracy, and prosody are provided for each text 
  • Detailed instructions to allow teachers to measure student fluency levels in words correct per minute (WCPM) and prosody using the four-level scoring rubric developed by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)
  • Laminated Tally Sheets and Student Recording Forms to make it easy to monitor student progress 
  • Student Fluency Readers for students to graph their own progress

Adding Wilson Fluency/Basic to current instruction

The Wilson Fluency | Basic Kit can supplement any reading program that introduces short vowels in words with progressively more challenging patterns. It is appropriate to use with the Wilson Reading System ® (WRS), Just Words®, and Fundations®.

Wilson Fluency/Basic lessons are designed to be used in a small-group or one-on-one setting. Depending on the lesson format of the program it is supplementing, lessons should be scheduled for approximately 10–20 minutes, one to three times per week. The teacher will select a passage that corresponds to students’ decoding skills or WRS substep. Upon completion of the baseline reading, subsequent practice lessons occur over a period of time.

Practice lessons include:

  • Word drills with controlled words and high frequency words
  • Drills with short, controlled phrases and longer phrases from the passage
  • Phrased passages

Upon completion of the practice lesson, improvement is tracked in words correct per minute (WCPM) and prosody with the same unphrased passage.

The Fluency/Basic Kit contains the following items:

  • Instructor Guidebook: Instructor materials come in a durable three-ring binder for convenient use in a small group or one-to-one lesson and includes: 
    • Instructor Guide
    • Enriched passages
    • High frequency word card sheets
    • Blank word card laminated sheets
    • Laminated tally sheets for each Fluency Reader
  • Student Record Pack: Students’ progress on each passage is charted by the instructor in each student’s individual record book.
  • Student Fluency Readers: Wilson Fluency/Basic contains four Fluency Readers. Each Fluency Reader contains five stories/reading passages of 200–300 words and corresponding word lists, phrases, and phrased and unphrased passages. Fluency Readers 1–3 correspond to WRS Steps 1–3. The Basic Reader includes additional decodable stories that correspond to an enriched passage.
    • Fluency Basic/Reader 1
    • Fluency Basic/Reader 2
    • Fluency Basic/Reader 3 
    • Fluency Basic/Basic Reader

Each kit contains a set of Readers to accommodate six students.

For more information about specific instructor and student materials and to order materials, please visit our online store.