S3 is reading through Pride and Prejudice at almost tortoise speed. There are so many resources when I look them up in google. I’d like to find something that’s effective and likely to stick and help comprehension. For those parents with some personal experience - what’s the best?
both daughters (at ages 17, 11) took the speed-reading course: http://readingprograms.org/
offered at loyola university in new orleans. neither found it helpful, i’m afraid.
Are the Evelyn Wood courses still around? No idea if they were effective but I sure remember the tv commercials as a kid.
I mean this respectfully, but why would you want to speed read Pride and Prejudice?
A potential issue may be one’s engagement with the story. For a teen, a book written 200 years ago might not be relevant. I’ve found that I am ready - in terms of life experiences primarily - for different books at different ages. I thoroughly enjoyed Jane Austen after college.
I have a couple of kids who are slow readers, so I did want to help them improve their reading speed. We did targeted speed reading practice. (I would not do this with Pride and Prejudice right now. I would pick a novel unrelated to a current school assignment.)
This is the method I used. I had them start with 1 minute intervals of reading as fast as they could, stopping after every minute and re-telling what was read in order to ensure comprehension was being maintained. I had them do 1minute re-tells for about 10mins total. I had them keep track of the the approx length of each 1min passage. We did this daily until they had significantly increased their 1minute passage length. Then we continued the process for 3-min intervals for a total of 15 mins. After those passages significantly increased in length, we moved on to 5 min passages/re-tells for 25 mins.
After my kids have done this for about 6 weeks, their reading speed has improved substantially.
@Mom2aphysicsgeek That sounds like an excellent method! My kids are great readers, but AP reading is taking them a ton of time. This sounds promising.
Is this new or has your son always had trouble with reading and comprehension? I think that once you know how to read well, the more you read, the better you get at it. My husband is dyslexic and when he was in grade school the remediation they used included a speed reading machine. His comprehension suffered and he came away feeling stupid because they didn’t address the cause of his slow reading. For struggling readers, it’s important to make sure there aren’t any underlying issues first, then work with materials they’re interested in to build their skills.
After our daughter was diagnosed I spent hours reading to (and for) her. We read anything that caught her interest. She’s now a teen and devours books faster than I can supply them. But, like her dad, the materials she reads fastest and retains the most information about are those she’s interested in. I can plow through material even if I don’t like it; but it’s very difficult for dyslexics to do that. If your son has trouble with comprehension, I’d address that first and worry about the speed later.
Fwiw, my kids who are slow readers are 2E–gifted, but dyslexic. They are the kids who used the method described.
@austinmshauri He’s a top math and science student and slow reader with average comprehension. Looks like he’ll finish with a B in Advanced Standing freshman English. He enjoys reading science and loves reddit. But he was so angry about having to go into Jane Austin’s world - which he found stupid and a waste of time. I tried to explain sometimes you have to read material you’re not crazy about. He plodded and delayed and harrumphed but we’re near the end of the year and the results will be ok. I can say that high school English is definitely not breeding a love of literature. Next year as a sophomore he’ll be in CP track English but do AP Bio and pre-calculus. Yet another Engineer on the way.
I’d suggest using a kindle…I read much faster on mine, and the books are less expensive.
omg - speed reading is like mid 90’s crap. honestly the best way to read is to
preview what you plan to read
make predictions of what you plan to read
make connections of what you are about to read
ask questions while you read
supplement the reading - go outside to cliff notes and movies — no no not to cheat and not read the text but to read the text and then add more resources to enhance comprehension
SAVE YOUR MONEY.
reading is a process and for some it’s slow — you know it’s all about comprehension so forget about how fast they read it focus on HOW they read it ( use that basic framework i mentioned above - i used to be an English teacher)
also ask you teacher if they are doing annotated or cornell notes.
I took a speed reading class years ago, and it was absurdly easy. All you do is have some kind of pointer like a pen or pencil, and as you’re reading at normal speed, follow along at the same pace with the tip of the pointer underneath the words you’re reading.
After you’ve been able to maintain that for a few minutes, start moving the pointer slightly faster, but not so fast that you can’t easily keep up. Following the pointer keeps your mind focused on reading. Do that for a few minutes, and then increase the speed of the pointer a little more. Don’t strain yourself, though. Each day I did this, I was able to go a little faster than the day before. It’s like practicing a skill. The more you do it, the faster you can go. I’ll guess I increased my reading speed 400%-500% over the course of two weeks, with no loss of comprehension.
I knew a guy who did the classic speed-reading thing where he’d spend three seconds wiggling his finger down each page. He said he could only get the gist of what was on the page if he read like that. If he wanted to understand better, he’d often have to do the finger-wiggle down the the same page multiple times.
None of this works for things like physics or calculus textbooks. There’s no easy shortcut for those.
@Mom2aphysicsgeek, I’m going to have to try that then, not so much for speed but to see if it helps with comprehension. Thanks for sharing. Maybe the reason that speed reading didn’t work for my husband is that he was plopped in front of a machine and didn’t get any reading interventions.
@patertrium, I think I’d supply him with as many science related materials as I could, read them myself, then ask him about them. That’s one of the things I do with my daughter and I think it helps. It takes time on my part because I have to keep up with her reading as well as my own, but we’ve had some great conversations.
I remember this coming up in the NY Times some time ago. The op-ed writers are researchers in the field, and were skeptical.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/sorry-you-cant-speed-read.html
So while increasing speed is a good thing, it shouldn’t happen at the expense of comprehension. Anecdotally, I tend to work my way through books at a deliberate pace - It took me a week of vacation during which I did little else to get through Team of Rivals. Even so, I save time by comparison with classmates who finish books in 2-3 days but have to re-read them when an assignment/test arrives.
It all depends on the reason a kid is reading slowly. If they spend a lot of time pondering each passage before moving on, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If understanding is the issue, then some tricks that improve reading speed can’t hurt, though expecting too much is ill-advised.