Speed Reading
Joseph Mark Warner
Objectives:
NCSCS-
6th grade, 7th grade, and 8th grade.
Competency Goal 5: The learner will respond to various
literary genres using interpretive and evaluative process.
5.01
Increase fluency, comprehension, and insight through a
meaningful and
comprehensive
reading program by:
using effective reading strategies
to match type of text.
NCTE- 6th grade, 7th
grade, and 8th grade.
Standard #3: Students apply a wide range of strategies to
comprehend, interact, evaluate, and appreciate text.
Purpose:
Speed reading is a minilesson to
provide students with ideas on how to make reading effective, efficient, and
enjoyable. Many students read at a pace that is both laborious and
non-productive. Individuals who have developed these reading skills are able to
read faster and retain more of what they read.
When to teach:
This lesson is a skills lesson. For
the first month, minilessons should be given in procedures. The second month of
the year would be more appropriate for this lesson. After a month of
interaction with the students, the teacher has better idea of the reading
abilities of the students.
Script:
Good morning! Reading is one of
the ways that we gather knowledge about the world around us. What are reasons
that we don’t read as much as we should read? (Wait for answers.) I think that
one of the biggest reasons is that we don’t have the tools-strategies- that
allow us to read quickly and extract the information that we desire. Do you
agree? (Wait.) When we are inexperienced as readers, the reading of text can be
slow, laborious, and un-enjoyable. Today, I would like to show some strategies
that I think will help you speed up your reading and allow you to retain more
of your reading in your material. (Pass out copy of the “Reading Room” and
“SQ3R”) The main purpose is to read effectively and efficiently. One of the
main problems we have as readers is our ability to concentrate. Practice
reading by reading for short periods and increase this time. (Give an example
of reading a textbook>) When reading a hard text, work on increasing your
vocabulary-keep a vocabulary journal. (Show the examples of vocabulary that can
be seen as a code.) The English dictionary has over 75,000 words-survival
English requires 2,000 words, proficient English 5,000, excellent 7,000-10,000;
what about the rest? To jest pomnik Kopernika., - - -…- - -, 2p3kd12p3ka2,
(9+9)/(10-1)=. We also tend to focus on words rather than blocks of words when
we read new text or hard to read text-such as the Polish, Kto to jest. If we
learn to focus on a block of 2 to 3 words, our reading becomes much faster and
we take in more. Skip back is going over and over a particular group of words
in a text- like a bad record. If we read by sub vocalizing or by pointing to
each word, this slows down our reading. (Practice reading by sub vocalizing and
then read the same passage over.) Which was faster? (Wait) Sometimes we can
improve our reading by using the SQ3R method- Survey, Question, Read useful
sections in detail, Recall, Review-Magazine articles are examples where one
might want to use this type of reading strategy. Finally, we can improve our
speed by reading more. Nothing improves without practice.
Materials:
Magazine article to read
Copy of SQ3R to hand out
Article to practice with sub
vocalization and silent reading
Time for Lesson:
15 minutes
Resources:
http://www.readingmatrix.com/reading/speed-reading.html
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newISS_02.htm