One strategy in helping students improve their reading fluency is to break down sentences into smaller chunks or phrases. These groups of words can then be practiced as a unit to move away from word-by-word reading.
However, instead of starting at the beginning of the sentence, I’ve found it works well for fluency practice to start with the LAST phrase in the sentence. Your student will then get multiple repeated readings of each phrase as they build back the sentence phrase by phrase. If our sentence is “His job is to help the ships get past the rocks and back to the dock.”, then you would start with
“back to the dock”
Once the student can comfortably read just that phrase, then add the prior phrase: “past the rocks and back to the dock”. I like to have the student figure out what part is new and mark the new and the old. Practice just the new part, then when that is solid, add the old part back in.
Continue adding phrases from the sentence until you have reconstructed the entire sentence.
back to the dock
past the rocks and back to the dock
help the ships get past the rocks and back to the dock
This is what it looks like on the page that the student reads from:
back to the dock
past the rocks and back to the dock
help the ships get past the rocks and back to the dock
His job is to help the ships get past the rocks and back to the dock.
By starting from the end and working backwards, I find that students are much less likely just to parrot back the phrases, because they have to get through the new phrase first before getting to what they practiced on the previous line. Give it a try ahead of time with a few sentences from your story, then see what happens when your student gets to those passages in their reading!