Practicing with fluency passages is an important part of helping your child improve with their ability to read fluently. If your child makes many errors while reading or the reading does not sound like a spoken conversation, he or she needs to practice reading fluency. Early readers spend a great deal of mental energy sounding out (decoding) the words on the page. Their reading often times sound robotic - not fluent. As a child learns the phonetic rules and can apply them with ease along with having automatic recall of all sight words, reading begins to sound more like fluent reading.
By fourth grade your child should be reading a minimum of 93 w.p.m. (words per minute) at the beginning of the year. Students progress to a reading rate of 105 w.p.m. (words per minute) by mid-year. As the fourth grade year comes to a close, your child should be reading at least 118 w.p.m (words per minute). Students considered to be challenge (cluster group) readers should set a goal of reading at least 150 w.p.m. (words per minute).