Reading for Intermediate and Advanced Learners, Spring, 2011

Rhythm Walks
Rhythm Walks is an activity in which students read chunked text created from a short poem or story. The teacher writes the chunks on sentence strips and places them in order throughout the classroom. The teacher models the Rhythm Walk, starting at the beginning of the pathway, and demonstrates fluid movements, accuracy, automaticity and prosody while reading. The students then line up at the start of the pathway and the first child reads the first strip aloud, takes a step to the next one and reads it aloud, continuing to walk and read until they reach the end of the pathway. The second child begins after the first one has completed three steps and when a child finishes, they get back in line and read the chunked text again. After all of the students have had an opportunity to walk and read 3-10 times (depending on the length of the passage and the number of children participating), the students go back to their seats and read the original passage silently to transfer their new reading skills to the connected text. After reading independently, students respond in a response journal or participate in a discussion or activity that allows the teacher to monitor comprehension of the passage.
I used this strategy with my second grade class. I used a poem from their basal that connected to story for the week as the text. The students had a great time and wanted to do another one. I was pleased how quickly and accurately they were able to answer comprehension questions about the poem. After the activity, they wrote in their response journals using sentence starters that I provided for them. They also did a very good job with that as well. This is a strategy that I plan to use again and again. The modeling is important. Before doing the activity again, I would emphasize that the children do not talk when they finish the walk and get in line to do it again. They seem to be excited and want to talk in between walks. A longer walk may be a better idea with a large class to keep waiting time down to a minimum.