Speed Reading Coaching Was Provided by My High School

My high school offered a semester of speed reading to my surprise. I’d heard the Evelyn Wood Speed Reading courses offered on the radio station for expensive prices, so I thought I’d take the course for free in high school.

I wish I’d also taken the typing course they offered, but I put off learning to type until I was in college. I needed rapid reading and typing skills in college as much as anything, because they loaded us up with books to read, then we’d have to do at least two research papers per semester for every class I took.

One the first day of my speed reading class, my teacher set up a clunky little projector that she demonstrated would flash words on the screen and she could change the setting to flash the next group of words according to a setting.

She explained, you don’t want to read every word, its preferable to have your eyes zig-zag from clumps of words that have more meaning. You let your mind go and throw away words like, the, and, but, etc.

To start with, she put it on a super low speed, so that you were actually bored with how long it took to flash the next paragraph on the screen. Impatiently, she was eager to turn the dial to a faster pace and you were supposed to just keep up.

I remember, not being sure if this technique was actually helping or not because before long, I felt like it was going so fast that my eyes were glazing over.

I could grab a group of words and have some recollection of the concept of the article, but I felt insecure that I was really getting it. The machine whirred on, click, click, click…

To this day, years after high school, I’m not sure how much the class helped. It seems to me that sheer practice has helped.

Today, I read and Tweet politics for about 3 hours a day. I work from a home office and design websites. Nearly every break I take, I go outside and sit on the porch and pull up a news feed on my cell phone. If I find the headline or article has value, I Tweet it to a group of around 60,000 followers. Sometimes I just read the headline, then Tweet it. When I’m really interested, I skim the article or read it completely. Knowing that if I get it wrong, I’ll immediately have critics reply, pointing out that I got it wrong.

Having this group of moderators pushes me to have very good comprehension, because you feel silly if you promote something inaccurately.

I’ve published about 50,000 Tweets and it seems to me that I’m able to fly through a ton of articles because I have a keen interest in politics. I haven’t tested myself, but my guess is, going through such a large volume of content, my reading speed must be, at times, double the reading speed I had in high school.

Another reason I think I can fly through the material is because I’ve become familiar with who’s who in politics so I don’t have to slow down to figure out who they are talking about.

My question still remains as to the best way to teach a child to read and then go from sounding out words audibly, then reading silently while still sounding out every word, to letting go and just taking in the words and meaning without being tied to the speed at which you would read aloud.

Recently, I was commissioned to build a web site for a retired public school teacher that had dedicated her retirement to creating preschool curriculum to build a solid reading foundation while at a preschool age. The content is good for children at normal learning levels and exceptional for children with learning disabilities, like autism.

Their website is https://www.ReadItOnceAgain.com. Their curriculum has a common theme throughout, that excellent reading skills can be achieved through rhyme, rhythm and repetition. I think they could add one more r word and say rhyme, rhythm, repetition and reading.

I throw in reading because I think reading a lot growing up leads to the ability your whole adult life to soak in many more ideas for your to stretch and grow as a person.

So far, in my search to learn rapid reading, the best answer I’ve gotten is to spark a child’s interest in something, then let them on their own curiosity let books fill that hunger.

If you have any ideas on how to develop faster reading skills, I’d love for you to share them in the comments below.

 

 

Speed Reading for Adults Begins in Preschool

In my first post on this blog, I recounted how I learned to read at a preschool age around 3 to 4 years old. It started with a record player along with a printed guide to match words with what they mean and how they are said.

As my phonetic skills improved, my parents used a combination of reading bedtime stories to asking me to read the books to them and sounding out every word.

This worked wonders as I was able to read out loud and pronounce the words correctly. Along with discussion about the meaning of the story, I learned comprehension. Later, this skill has stayed with me for my adult life allowing me to perform well, even in college.

One limitation occurred in this learning sequence, I found myself sounding out the words when I was doing silent reading in high school. I completely understood what I was reading and tested well on the content, however, I found myself bound to how fast I could read audibly even though I was reading silently. I read silently in my mind as if I was reading aloud.

This gave me a reading speed of around 600 to 700 words per minute in high school. I was awarded for my performance by an invitation to be on the National Honor Society, but it took more time at home to read the material than other kids who became avid readers in elementary school. I recall one of my best friends in grade school, a boy named Bobby, read voraciously all kinds of what I considered big books. I’d go to the library and open the books he’d been reading for fun and I rolled my eyes thinking just how long those books would take me to read. So, the first big book of around 500 pages I read was at age 13. It was a racy novel by Jacqueline Suzanne, named, “Once Is Not Enough”.

I found that the book brought me into an adult world that, as a young teenager, I was hungry to learn about. I was so proud of myself as I held the book up for inspection after I’d conquered it. Wow, I read the whole thing!

No doubt, my childhood friend could have read the book in 4 or 5 hours, while it has taken me two weeks of reading a little every day.

The larger picture I’m suggesting is that the ability to read 1500 wpm or above makes all the difference for you as you become an adult. A wise person once said, you’ll be the same person you are today in 5 years, except for the books you read and the friends you keep. The greatest thoughts in the world have been recorded in the written word, so having the skill to consume them effortlessly is possible one of the greatest skills you can develop in school, K through 12.

Much of what I learned in school, I’ve never used as an adult. Case in point, I took geometry, pre-algebra, algebra 1, 2 & even algebra 3 & trigonometry, but its never made me a dime as an adult. I’m sure it stretched my mind and taught me to be disciplined and focused, but the ability to do abstract math, has served me poorly as an adult.

So, my big question is: how do you go from being able to read words, pronounce them correctly in early childhood to being a fast, voracious reader.

I really don’t know, so I just called my step brother, who though he was a rowdy kid and hung out with the wrong crowd, how he became such a fast reader.

When I was at a university getting my bachelors degree to teach in a public high school, I was doing my internship at a local school and found a 23 page story by science fiction writer named Ray Bradbury that I thought was gripping. It took me about 30 minutes to read and then brought it to the class I was teaching. The students loved it as well because the story held stimulating ideas and was extremely poignant.

I was talking to my step brother, who I thought of as a juvenile delinquent, about how well the class had responded to the story. He said, give me the book, I want to read it. I thought his pride was kicking in and he’d come back to me after a while and feed me a bunch of garbage about how he’d read the story and that he would try to snow me.

I handed him the book and 10 minutes later, he came back and said, yes, its a good story; I can see why the kids like it.

There was no way he could have read that story in 10 minutes and comprehended all the nuances, so I immediately started pelting him with questions, because that story took me 30 minutes to read while I was in college.

He proved me wrong. He loved the story, he understood the plot completely and he actually read it in one third of the time it took me to read it.

This is why I called him this week, some thirty years later, to ask him how he became such a fast reader.

At first, he kinda shrugged it off, but I kept digging because I really wanted to know because he had humbled me.

He started recalling that he spent a lot of time with his deaf grandparents and they encourage him to read. I thought BINGO, that was it! He learned to appreciate words because he had deaf grandparents. That was the secret.

No, he said, that wasn’t it.

Well, what was the secret, I pressed. He said, maybe it was a couple of things. They had a collection of big Disney books in the house and when he watched the Sunday night, “The Wonderful World of Disney,” it sparked his interest, so the rest of the week, he’d dive into the Disney books, until he got to see the show the next week.

He came up with two other reasons that he might have become an exceptional reader. His uncle was often at his house and he was 13 years older and he looked up to him, so he hung on his uncle’s ideas. His uncle was into politics and higher level subjects. To relate to him, he stretched to please him. This experience got him reading some of the news much earlier than most children.

The other thing was that he loved music. He loved how it made him feel and he would spend hours and hours listening to it. He would bang his imaginary drums in the air with his eyes closed envisioning himself on stage before an admiring crowd.

He listened to every word of the lyrics and could spout them off along with the songs for hours. This attracted him to reading everything he could get his hands on to learn about the music, the musicians’ bios and the meaning of their songs. This hunger to learn about music drove him to read and read and read everything he could.

To sum it up, he said his desire to learn about what he was enjoying on the radio is what got him to love reading.

This shatters my paradigm because I was looking for a sequential technique for early childhood reading curriculum that leads to success, but for him, it was his desire to know more.

How do you add that as a skill? Its elusive because who knows what will spark a young mind to want to read everything they can get their hands on about a subject that attracts them?

So, for me, the formula for reading success as a young child is:

1. Phonics
2. Someone reading you bedtime stories
3. Then, getting the child to read the stories out loud so the monitor can guide them
4. Getting the child to find a subject that makes them want to learn everything they can about the subject through reading.

Step number 4 could be the most important ingredient in the reading recipe. It seems that children are naturally curious, so one just has to expose them to the world of opportunity until they land on something that inspires them.

What are your thoughts on how to get kids to go from being a competent reader, for testing, to loving to read so much that they can’t put a big fat book down until they’ve read it?

 

How I Learned to Read in Preschool with Phonics & Help from Mom

 

When I was 3 or 4 years old, my parents purchased a phonograph to play records. Then, they purchased a record set, probably a lot like “Hooked on Phonics.

The phonics tutorials were fun as I recall, and to connect written words to learn how to pronounce words. It was extremely helpful to see the words as the record played, making it easy to learn all the exceptions to the rules, like silent letters, words influenced by foreign languages. Also, seeing letter combinations that can sound the same, like f and ph, made learning a breeze.

While my mom cooked, she multi-tasked by having me read books with lots of pictures. There was usually a large illustration on the page to attract me emotionally, and then below, there was a simple sentence. My mom could cook dinner and still monitor my verbal reading without missing a beat. To this day I’m so grateful that she made this ritual a common practice. Its probably why my verbal skills IQ test was in the 130s when I test tested in elementary school.

My mom, and occasionally, my dad, would read me books at bedtime. The genius of it was to expose me to a whole new world inside of a book. Great strategy!

Later, they would give me the same book and have me read it to them while I was in bed. If I struggled with a word, they’d help me though it.

In elementary school, I had friends that would read big books as if they were totally addicted to reading. I’d go to the library and thumbed through the books they’d already read, thinking, wow, that’s a lot to read. I’d start at page one and read the first paragraph and sound out the words in my mind. My friends became voracious avid readers, whereas, I just became very competent when I needed to read for school, but since I sounded out the words in my mind, I think my speed suffered. I was held back by the speed in which I’d read audibly, even though I was pronouncing the words in my mind.

In high school, I remember having good grades & was a member of the National Honor society. One weakness remained, I still found myself sounding out the words in my mind as I read books. I think that I missed the leap that avid readers had learned long ago, reading in clumps of words, rather than sounding it out in my mind.

I think I was reading around 600 to 700 words per minute in high school and I rarely read books. I just did the best I could to read enough to get good grades.

When I went to a university after high school, the reading requirements shot up exponentially. I remember taking 21 hours in a compressed summer school semester and one class required me to read over 20 plays in 6 weeks. I couldn’t keep up, so I winged it, relying on reading the teacher and giving them back what I thought they wanted. That worked, but still I never read all those plays and I’m sure I missed out on a lot of enrichment.

The one skill I regret not possessing as an adult is speed reading. Voracious reading is one of the best ways to expand your horizons. I read about 2 or 3 hours a day of news on the internet, which has probably helped me get up to about 1500 words per minute. When I find something that intrigues me, I share it on Twitter. I’ve made about 50,000 Tweets to date. I have to make my Tweets accurate, or followers immediately call me out, so I don’t just fly through the articles, I have to have precise comprehension, because who wants to be called out for creating fake news.

To this day, I don’t know the best way to go from learning how to read and pronounce words when you’re at the preschool age, to getting kids hooked on books. If anyone has a recommendation on how to get kids to go from reading the words slowly in their mind to empowering  children to read groups of words with the leap to more of a speed reading style, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Someone with wisdom said, you’ll be the same person in 5 years as you are today except for the books you read and the people you associate with. After that is said, they usually say, “leaders are readers”.

These insightful admonitions remind me of the profound statement that Oliver Wendell Homes gave us:

“A mind, once expanded by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.”