What is The Six-Minute Solution?
The Six-Minute Solution is a simple, hassle-free program that builds students’ reading fluency in just six minutes a day. For students in grades K–12, this peer-driven solution pairs same-skill-level students to read age-appropriate nonfiction passages and record each other's progress with fluency and accuracy.
The Six-Minute Solution Helps Teachers Challenge All of Their Students to Build Fluency and Comprehension Skills
Quick-and-Easy Implementation
- Materials are user-friendly and time-efficient
- One book includes all resource materials
- Teachers are provided explicit instruction
Benefits All Students
- Helps struggling readers gain fluency first at word level, then passage level
- Challenges competent readers with expressive texts that are difficult and sophisticated
- Content-area texts are organized by interest level and readability, individualizing practice for all learners
Performance Improves in ALL Content Areas
- Nonfiction passages support science, social studies, and humanities to build background knowledge
- Fluency helps students complete class and homework assignments efficiently
Why The Six-Minute Solution?
- Actively engages and motivates students with peer-to-peer interaction
- Increases fluency, time on task, and work completion in all content areas
- Quick, easy, and flexible implementation
- Improves student performance in all content areas
- Can be used in classrooms and groups of all sizes with no special materials required
- Research-based and field-tested, incorporating proven partnering and repeated-reading techniques
- Professional development is embedded, requiring no teacher training
- Effective with all students, including English language learners and students with special needs
- Addresses multiple levels of fluency, making it easy to differentiate instruction
- Reliable initial and ongoing assessment
Who Benefits from The Six-Minute Solution?
The Six-Minute Solution is a beneficial program for all students in grades K–12 since the flexibility of the program scaffolds up as students progress in their fluency. It can be used with advanced readers to reinforce their reading skills as well as struggling readers, those with special needs, and English language learners.
Evidence Based Reading Fluency
The Six-Minute Solution builds students’ fluency across all grade levels. The program empowers teachers to make the most of every second with an efficient, fast-paced instructional routine that takes marked steps toward reading success.
Proven Reading Comprehension Results
Administrators at Meadowbrook Middle School in Poway, CA placed 52 students who were reading at least two years below grade level, in a 24-day program using The Six-Minute Solution. By the end of the program, all students experienced significant gains in reading fluency and comprehension.
Working with Words: A Summer Reading Intervention Program (Adams, Brown, and Van Zant, 2000)
“Reading gains recorded by the summer school intervention students were outstanding in many cases. Pre-assessment fluency scores on a sixth-grade passage ranged from a low of 40 correct words per minute (cwpm) to a high of 136 cwpm. Post-assessment rates ranged from a low of 61 cwpm to a high of 195 cwpm. The average reading fluency gain was 36 percent.”
Working with Words: A Summer Reading Intervention Program (Adams, Brown, and Van Zant, 2000)
“The Six-Minute Solution was implemented in two classrooms: a heterogeneous fourth-grade classroom of 31 students and a combined fourth–fifth-grade class in the Los Penasquitos Academy. In the fourth-fifth grade Academy classroom, 24 of the 25 students (95 percent) demonstrated a significant gain in oral reading fluency as measured by a comparison of pre- and post-cwpm scores on grade-level passages.”
Florida Center for Reading and Research
“The Six-Minute Solution lends itself to flexible use in a variety of settings and can be used with the entire classroom where students work in pairs, during small group teacher-led instruction, with cross-age pairs, and with students working individually. ”