Speed Reading for Kids
It is never too late nor too early to learn how to do speed reading. Kids have brains like a sponge. They absorb well the things that they learn or come across with which is why it is at this point of their lives where they are taught about the basic facts because it is what they will be carrying around until they grow up to be adults. There have been studies that have shown that kids are fast learners compared to adults particularly kids that are in the age of 8 to 12 years of age. If your child is at this age, it would be best that you taught them at this time to learn how to speed read.
Children actually have the natural ability to speed read and this is something that may come surprising to parents out there. If this is paired with the right and formal training, the rate that a child can read is very obvious when the results show. After a month’s formal training of speed reading, every four children out of five is able to read at least two thousand words per minute with total no difficulty. The main goal of the whole speed reading exercise is to make the child comprehend how to read faster and make him or her understand the things that he or she is reading. There are actually four important areas that needs concentration when we speed reading is being taught.
Natural vision
Our sense of sight is obviously a large factor of our reading. Speed reading would not be effective if a child tries to interpret each and every word the kid reads. This may come as a surprise but speed reading only happens when a kid learns to see the whole page of the material he or she is reading at the same time. It is somewhat like viewing an image while we are also looking at the entire picture. It is in natural vision where viewing the entire page is done instead of looking at a single line of the whole page at a time and it becomes the basis of speed reading.
Visualization
When a child learns how to place his or her sight on a text or a page as a broad image the child then eventually learns how to use the skill of visualization. It is with visualization where the child no longer sees just an image but something that he or she can relate it to other real-life things that makes it easier for a child to remember. A lot of children find it easier to remember the words they reading if it is transformed into sounds, smell, emotion and color.
Relaxation
A lot of kids get real excited about learning how to speed read and they are very conscious if they are making progress or not. This results to kids who try even more to catch up and place so much effort into it. When this happens, the child may lessen the level of comprehension skill and their anxiety causes them to loss focus thus lessening their performance so it is really important that they stay relaxed throughout the process.
Habituation
Habit is very hard to forget or to undo so speed reading should be in this form. It may take time to learn how to speed read and practice would be a very big help.
Two Very Useful Speed Reading Exercises
A lot of us may hear of speed reading but not all of us may fully understand what speed reading is really about. When we say speed reading, it mainly is about getting rid of the bad habits that are so used to and we may have picked up when we were still kids and at a time when we were just learning how to read words.
As time goes by, we may have gotten used to reading one word at a time or read word for word. There really is nothing wrong with this if we are just beginning to learn how to read, pronounce and understand what each word is actually about. This may not be the best way to read efficiently. Here, you will be able to read the two very useful speed reading exercises that you may help you to speed read.
The very first speed reading exercise is learning how to place your attention on the right place when reading for you to enhance your speed in reading. You may need a timer or a stopwatch for this and a book with a content that is easy to read—no hard to pronounce words or words that are rarely used that you will need a dictionary! With the use of your index finger or if you want, you may use a pen and just point out the words when reading them. You can move your finger faster so that your eyes will follow this pace as well learning how to come up with a rhythm when reading. When you are doing this, you actually try your best to read more and more words at a time. Once you have finished reading the first page you may stop and check your timer and try to see how long it took you to read the whole thing. You may want to keep up with your much increased speed reading and check your timer often.
The second exercise is about enhancing your comprehension and your speed too. When you do this, you actually practice reading larger blocks of words at a time. To do this, you take a piece of index card and practice on reading three lines at a time for the duration of five minutes.
These are just two simple yet very effective ways of learning how to speed read. Remember that practice makes perfect and to master things practice is all that it takes for you to improve your speed reading. It would be so great if you learn how to read through pages at a faster pace and at the same time understanding what the text is all about.
Anyone would love to learn how to read faster since we read everyday wherever we go and in most things we do which is why the benefits of speed reading is very beneficial to all of us. May we be into reading our favourite novels, studying books that we use in school or just getting through the morning with a newspaper, speed readings comes in handy.
Ways on How to Speed Read
Anyone would love to have the skill of learning how to read at a quicker pace. Now a days, people are seeing speed reading as somewhat the “newest craze in town” and is becoming the newest self-help industry raising billions of dollars. But despite the many books out there that are sold just to give you the tips on how to do the speed reading, there are still ways on how you can teach yourself to do it without having to spend so much money or better yet not spend anything at all.
Like most activities meant for self-development, you will first have to obtain what your baseline speed is before getting into the techniques of speed reading. To assess yourself, take any material for reading (a newspaper article would be recommended but if you don’t have any anything will do) and from there, count the number of words you can read within a minute since in reading the basis is usually the number of words per minute. Or you can simply time yourself on how long it took for you to finish reading the article. So that after trying on the methods, you will know the progress that you have made.
At the beginning, you first have to take your reading at a slow pace. You may have had the habits that slows down your reading and may get in the way of your practice but since you are going to start from the very beginning in learning how to be a speed reader, you will have to undergo reformation of your reading so this means taking it slow at first and learning new and better practices.
The very first step you need to do in order to become a speed reader is to stop doing the sub-vocalization. Whenever we sub-vocalize words, we allow our minds to make the sounds of the words that we are reading within us. Believe it or not but this is actually has a great effect to your reading pace and it slows down the reading because there are times when we tend to stick to one word and have to say it in our thoughts one by one.
The next step that you want to do is to do a real quick scan over the text that you will be reading. What you are actually taking note of here are the fonts of the words that are bold, large or italicized. You want to take note of which words are being highlighted by the author—this may come in the form of words or phrases too. Should it happen that what you have is a text that is uniform (none of them are highlighted, bold, italicized or large for that matter), then try looking for a word or set of words that is or are being mentioned over and over again throughout the text.
Last but not the least is to skim or read quickly. When you do this, it is not that necessary for you to read each and every word one at a time. There are expert advises that suggests the reader skips the third or the fourth word and head to the next but you can also try on other techniques on doing this. You can try looking for the technique that best works out for you.
All about Speed Reading Techniques
There is so much benefit we can get out of learning how to read at a much faster pace. But before jumping into knowing how speed reading works and what techniques are involved, it would be best if you could first assess yourself at which rate you are in before you try on a speed reading technique. Whatever the result of your assessment, you then keep this as your basis so that this way you can check once in awhile if your speed reading technique works for you and are you improving.
Of course, the text you will be choosing for your speed reading will greatly affect your performance. The content of the text will affect your speed. When you are able to check how many words per second you are able to read that will serve as your baseline. You will also be able to tell what kind of speed reading technique you will need.
There is a number of speed reading techniques that you may want to know. Whatever the method you choose, its main goal is for you to learn to read faster. Newspaper reading, close reading, active reading and exploratory reading are just a few of the examples of speed reading techniques.
- Newspaper Reading
By and large, when we read a newspaper article, we notice that the very essential point of that news article is being placed at the first paragraph and this is also where we are able to take note of the “lead”. What it does is it first places the important facts at the first part of the article and the rest of the details are found below.
- Close Reading
Close reading is actually one method that a lot of students are using. This kind of method is closely crucial when in the field of academics because it gives the reader full details of the information that they need to know. It is not just merely scanning through the text. It is here where the reader gets hold of the information that is really needed because none of them is put aside, everything is included.
- Active Reading
In active reading you are actually placing your brain in a thought-provoking situation. This is because it is in this kind of reading where you get your mind to work by asking questions and getting interested into the attention-grabbing parts of the text you are reading. Scanning and deep reading are also options but this is not that necessary at all times. You always have to bear in mind what your goal is and stick to it all throughout your reading.
- Exploratory Reading
In exploratory reading it falls in between skimming and close reading. Here you don’t necessarily have to browse through everything in order for you to fully get a grip of the whole thing that you’re reading. All you need here is just general knowledge from what you are reading without the bits and pieces of the details what is important is you understand the material of the text.
These are just a few of the speed reading techniques you may make use of. There are still more to these methods all you need to do is make a little research about it and pick one that you think best works for you.