Often students read word by word and do not recognize meaningful syntactic chunks, or phrases, while they read. This activity teaches the importance of chunking words to build reading fluency. Let's practice the Chunking activity. For this Institute, we selected one reading passage; however, when you conduct this lesson, select material that is at an instructional or independent level for each group. The reading passage should be annotated with slash marks between chunks to mark two- to five-word sentence segments and prepositional phrases. When reading a chunking passage, pause briefly between phrases exactly as marked. No pauses in your chunking passage sample should be made except where marked by slash marks. The person not reading should help the reader decode any unfamiliar words, so intentionally make a few errors as you read.