Meet Richard. He’s a seventh grader who has spent years in and out of reading intervention. If you sit with him in a quiet corner, he can decode most of the words you put in front of him—he knows his phonics rules. But when he opens a social studies textbook? He’s slow, halting, and clearly exhausted by the third paragraph. Like so many of our striving readers in upper elementary and middle school, Richard has the “what” of reading, but he’s missing the “how” of fluency.

For years, we’ve focused—rightly so—on the Science of Reading to ensure all children receive explicit, systematic instruction. But as my friend Dr. Carolyn Strom and I discussed in a recent webinar, instruction is only the first step. The missing piece for students like Richard is often the Science of Learning—the research that tells us how to make learning stick.

If we want students to move from effortful sounding-out to smooth, automatic reading, we have to talk about practice. But not all practice is created equal.

Moving From “Drill and Kill” to “Thrill and Skill”

When many of us hear the word “practice,” we think of “drill and kill”—doing the same task over and over until it’s memorized. Honestly, our students can’t afford that. It bores the brain and rarely leads to the kind of flexibility and automaticity students need for real-world reading.

Instead, I want us to think about rich and varied practice.

While instruction is the work we do as teachers, practice is the work of the student. It is during systematic practice that the brain recognizes patterns and chunks information.  Neural connections are developed and learning becomes consolidated. This enables efficient access and retrieval to support reading without having to think about every letter. To build those efficient pathways, practice must be systematic, but it also has to be varied.

The Power of Variability

In a study we did at the University of Iowa, we looked at how first graders learned vowel sounds. We compared students who practiced with very similar words (like met and pet) to those who practiced with words where the surrounding letters were always changing.

The results were striking. Kids learned much better when the words were varied. More importantly, those children were far better at generalization.

Generalization is the “magic” of learning; it’s the ability to take a pattern you’ve learned and apply it to a brand-new word you’ve never seen before. 

This process is closely tied to orthographic mapping, which is how our brains form a connection between a word’s sounds and its letter patterns. When we provide varied practice, we help that mapping become more flexible and durable.

Bringing These Ideas to Your Classroom

How do we move this from research to your classroom? Dr. Strom shared some wonderful “thrill and skill” activities and we’re taking that one step further so that you can use them right away:

• Vary the Task with “M & M” Words: Try a “Multiple Meaning” chart. When a student reads a word like cap, talk about all its meanings—a hat, a bottle top, or even the slang “no cap”. This strengthens orthographic mapping by connecting the letters to a rich network of meaning.

• Highlight Relevant Contrasts: Help students notice the details that change a word. This could be as simple as a read-aloud where you purposefully point out phoneme contrasts that are easily confused—like goats versus coats.

The Role of Digital Practice

In many classrooms, this kind of practice happens on a computer. But we must be careful: if a program is just “digital flashcards,” it isn’t helping the brain grow.

When my husband Jerry and I created WordFlight, we built it to be a bridge between decoding and fluency. We use the Varied Practice Model to target the same sounds and patterns across many different tasks so that the patterns of the language “pop” for the student. We aren’t just looking for them to pass a level; we are looking for the automaticity that serves as the gateway to true understanding.

A Path Toward Dignity

Why does this matter so much? Because for students like Richard, reading is about dignity and opportunity. When a student reaches middle school and still struggles to read smoothly, they often hide or “check out” to protect themselves from feeling embarrassed.

By providing the right practice at the right time, we can help these students build the confidence they need. We are moving them from the frustrated, “halting” reading of a beginner to the effortless, joyful reading of an expert.

I’d love to hear from you: How are you using interleaving or varied tasks in your classroom to move your students toward true automaticity and fluency? 

This article is based on a webinar that Dr. Carolyn Strom and Dr. Carolyn Brown gave on building reading fluency, with a focus on the role of rich and varied practice. You can watch that webinar on demand here.