How I Set Up a Fluency Center in my Special Ed Classroom

Let's talk about what to do once a student has mastered a skill. I am Jen and I am one of the bloggers here at The Autism Helper, and I am going to talk to you all about fluency centers. It is February in my classroom and my students have learned so much, but it is time to put those skills into fluent practice. And so I'm going to set up a fluency center in my classroom, and I thought you might want to come along for the journey. Being fluent in skills is helpful across the board, not just in the classroom. For example, being fluent in telling time is really important if you need to know what time it is. It is difficult if you need to know what time it is and you look at the clock and it takes a full minute to figure that out. It would be great for our students just to look at the clock and know instantly what time that was. That's freeing up brain power so they can focus on other things. In reading, fluency, especially with words, creates that bridge to comprehension. So it, it becomes an automatic answer, and that's what we want with skills that we have already mastered. So I'm working on skills that have already been mastered academically within my classroom, and I am going to put them in a fluency center for my students in a K-1, 2 self-contained class. This could be a variety of things, but I'm going to focus on one reading and one math goal for right now. So far this school year, we haven't been ready for fluency centers, and that's okay. My students have had to learn a lot of skills in order to get ready to this point. We have had to learn expectations in the classroom, how to sit, how to work in a one-to-one with an adult, how to rotate through centers, and it's February and we are finally ready. So if your students are not yet ready, that's okay. It's just a yet. This is something to work towards as they're mastering skills. So let me show you the materials that I need to run this center. One of the reasons that I love this is it is such little prep and such little time to get this center, and you get such a big impact out of it. For me, that's always a win. I have all the things that I need here. I have these zipper envelopes These are from Amazon. I think I got 20 or 30 for like $20. I love these because they are more durable than a Ziploc bag and I don't have to replace them all the time, and a full-size sheet of paper fits right inside, which I love. So this— every student will have a bag and this will be their fluency center bag. Next up, I have data sheets and a writing utensil because, well, we always need to write. And then I am going to choose the goal. This student is going to be working on letter identification, and I've chose an expressive goal. This student is a verbal student, and they are able to expressively identify their letters, and so I'm going to choose capital letters because that's the goal that I'm going to work towards, and I'm going to just choose one from my variety. I love this. My assistants did this for me. They organized all of my flashcards. Isn't this amazing? So it's really easy to pull that, and so I'm going to pull one of every letter and have it ready to go and put it inside the bag. Now that I have all my letter cards, I have a stopwatch. I am going to figure out how many letters the student can identify in 1 minute, and so I'm going to use a stopwatch to take that time, and like I said, I'm going to have a pen ready to go so all the data is easily taken and everything that we need is at our fingertips. And while this is a center, what I love about this is because this is so easy to just move wherever you need to go, I can have this center run in the classroom, I can have it run in the hallway, really my assistants can take this anywhere and get some really good data from it. So before I start writing in these boxes and taking daily data. What I want to do is find out the baseline. So because I'm looking at expressively identifying letters and I'm looking at capital letters, I'm going to take a baseline of data and just see how long it takes the student to identify all those letters. Then I'm going to create a goal from that baseline data. So from there, I'm going to have a date. So every time I practice the skill, we're going to put the date down. Then we're going to figure out how long it took the student, how many they got right, how many they got wrong, and what that rate was per minute. Now because this one is expressive, I'm gonna show the student the card and then I expect them to tell me the letter. So I'm gonna make 2 piles. I'm gonna make a correct pile and I'm gonna make an incorrect pile. So for example, if I show the student this letter and they say, "C," it goes in the correct pile. If I show them this letter and they say, "F," I'm gonna put it in the incorrect pile. The reason I do that is it keeps things moving quickly, and I am gonna keep track on my data sheet of how many they got right and how many they got wrong. If you have a student who's really sensitive to that and they pick up on that, one thing that you can do is you can move the card and separate it with your fingers. So for example, as you move it, just separate them in between, and so as you flip it back, you can just put the card in the correct pile or the incorrect pile. I've had to do that more than once, but if your student lets you, piles on the table, much easier. And that's it. It's going to take about 5 minutes to run this center for this student. I wasn't kidding when I said it takes a little amount of time and there's a big impact. So what I love about this is that now I have really meaningful data and I can see if there's an increase in that student's speed and fluency. Now, I get a ton of questions about how to adapt this to students who need a receptive task. Students who are maybe not yet verbal or are not yet fluent in their verbal skills, but they still need to work on fluency. So let me show you how I would change this task from expressive to receptive. So receptive tasks are just as easy to run and just as quick to be honest, but you do need a little bit more prep. So what I've done is I've laid out the cards that I'm working on. If I was working on all 26 letters, all 26 letters would be out and available. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a data sheet with random letters. Every letter that I'm working on is gonna be represented once, and then I'm gonna write yes and no. Did they get it correct or did they get it incorrect? Then I'm going to ask the student to point to the letters in this order. So for example, point to A, the student points to A and I mark off yes. Quickly then I go to B, show me B, they get it correct, so that's a yes. Show me F, maybe they point to E, so that is a no. Now I've got the same data, but it's a receptive task and it can be done just as quickly. Let's quickly talk about taking data and having the assistants or paraprofessionals in your classroom trained on fluency data. If you are helping your staff learn how to take data, I highly suggest that you start with fluency data. It is so simple to take and it doesn't take that much effort or energy, and you have so many data points that it's really easy to be able to create training opportunities. So here's how I'm going to do it in my room. The first day we're going to take baseline data. I'm going to take that data The second day, I'm going to have a staff member watch me take data while doing the scale. So I'm going to take that very first day, it's gonna be how many cards did they get, I'm gonna show them how to take the data, and then the next day, I'm going to observe the paraprofessional running that fluency drill. So they are gonna run it, I'm going to observe it, I'm gonna help them problem solve, And then by day 4, so baseline, I'm gonna do it, they're gonna observe, then they're gonna do it and I'm gonna observe. Day 4, they're on their own. I'm probably gonna check in, see how things are going in between, but really by day 4 or 5, your staff should be up and running. So I just finished pulling everything that I need for my students, all 8 of them. I have everything in, um, their envelopes ready to go, and it took me 22 minutes for 8 students to pull 2 fluency drills, 1 math, 1 reading. So this is a really big bang for your buck when it comes to time. You get a lot of really good data and it doesn't take a lot of time, effort, or energy. So if it's something you haven't tried yet in your classroom, I would highly encourage you giving it a shot. If you do run fluency centers in your classroom, I would love to hear how you do it and what works for you and any tips and tricks you might have for the rest of us.