How to teach your child to read quickly and meaningfully: 5 tips for parents

We tell you how your child (and you!) will benefit from the ability to read quickly and what are the secrets of mastering this art to the fullest.

Speed reading is not “swallowing” text for a while, but a tool for developing intelligence which confirms dra reading levels. It is a skill that allows you to quickly master unfamiliar text: 600 to 1,000 words per minute. Why is this technique essential to a child’s development? How does it improve an adult’s quality of life?

 

Start teaching reading before school

At age 5 or 6, children are already able to read aloud well at about 50 to 70 words per minute. But not everyone can do it. There are some who are still reading out loud in 4th grade, not because they are lazy or not trying, but because they were not taught in kindergarten, at home, or in first grade.

 

Children face problems not only because of deficiencies in schooling, but also because of internal causes: hyperactivity, speech disorders, motor skills, breathing, and many others. Kindergartens are now fond of phonetic parsing, and often the child is introduced to phonetics before learning to read: as a result, many children write “yabloko” for a long time afterwards in school.

 

Parents often think that teaching a child to read is the responsibility of the school. It’s a vicious circle. But if you want, you can get out of it. For example, you could start by studying https://argoprep.com/blog/kindergarten-sight-words-list-and-info/.

 

The most intensive development of the intellect occurs in the period from 4 to 14 years, so it is better to start learning to read before school.

 

Teach your child to read out loud and build up their vocabulary

A rich vocabulary in children’s spoken language does not come out of nowhere. It can come from conversations with parents:

 

– from conversations with parents,

 

– from lessons in clubs,

 

– when reading fiction.

 

After all, this develops both imagination and meaningful reading and it helps to understand what is multiples of. If a child encounters a word he doesn’t understand, he needs to explain it, show the object, action or phenomenon that it denotes, give examples of it. The Internet is an indispensable helper in this case. Then the word “gets a foothold,” takes its place “on the shelf”, i.e. in the baby’s head.

 

If a child starts to read to himself too early, his vocabulary often remains at the same level as it was when he quit reading aloud.

 

Retelling and memorizing poems by heart can also help with speech development.

 

There is retelling in the elementary school curriculum, but reading poetry by heart is becoming increasingly scarce, as it often causes difficulties for children. But even here parents should help: the child can draw what he or she is learning (“A lonely sail in the fog of the sea blue” – the sea, a boat with a sail, the sun), or memorize by meaning blocks (most often these are stanzas).

 

It’s also important to read “with expression” – the accents clarify the meaning of the poem for children. Read to children poems by both classics and modern children’s authors, and the better a child understands poetry, the easier it will be to memorize it.

 

Often children memorize poems by ear, for some it is easy, for others more difficult, but if you do it regularly, it will certainly affect the speed of reading, because it develops imagination, trains memory, creates involuntary stable associative connections that help them understand and remember what they have read.

 

Teach a short paraphrase.

This is a different job for each age. In elementary school, a child must retell a text almost verbatim after reading it once. He or she can learn this well by answering questions about the text.

 

In middle school (grades 5-8), it is the ability to emphasize the main point, that is, to retell what they have read briefly, focusing only on the main idea.

 

If a child in grade 5 reads less than 150 words per minute aloud (and, accordingly, less than 300 words “silently”), and this happens quite often, then it should be “finished” first, to give him what he did not give “primary”. There is nothing wrong with this, it is only important to accurately and timely find the missing moments and understand the causes of inhibition.

 

When these problems are solved, you can start teaching speed reading – a set of exercises for the articulation apparatus, the development of peripheral vision, the ability to scan the text, switch, concentrate, expand lateral vision, etc.

 

Interestingly, speed-reading skills allow not only to master textbooks and large works of fiction at a normal speed, but also to learn foreign languages and pass tests, even without always knowing the right answers.

 

Speed reading develops thinking processes, the brain starts to think faster, it is easier for a child to build logic chains, to think outside the box, it becomes both interesting and necessary. That is, the motivation to study grows.

 

Turn to specialists

You can develop reading speed yourself if you set this goal and be ready to try different methods on the Internet – there are a lot of them now, if only you wanted.

 

Each person is individual, but not everyone, especially a child, is able to correctly assess what he already knows well, and what you still need to learn and what to make an automatic skill.

 

In schools of speed-reading there are certain techniques, allowing teachers to quickly identify gaps and create an individual learning trajectory: with the help of mnemotechniques to improve memory, remove dysgraphia and dyslexia, increase mental performance and improve the ability to analyze the text. The latter is directly related to interdisciplinarity, which the public school has not yet mastered very much, despite the fact that modern FGOS (federal state educational standards) require students not only subject knowledge, but also possession of meta-subject competencies.

 

Everything is changing so rapidly that it is impossible to predict which skills will shoot up in the near future. But it is already clear that one of the main factors of success will be the ability to work with information, and here you can’t do without speed reading.

 

Show your own interest.

It is also the easiest and most difficult at the same time – to understand that it is necessary to own it. Without a desire to improve the situation and the will to get down to business, nothing will work. It is very difficult for a child to do it alone, and not every adult understands himself so well to do self-development.

 

Parents bring their children to schools of speed reading, but, interestingly, they often go there to study after their children, because they see the real result. They have their own methods: adults have already developed certain reading habits, and teachers often have to correct fixed incorrect skills.

 

And also increases the ability to concentrate, so it also becomes a prevention of diseases associated with memory loss. And it improves the quality of life. That is why there is at least one speed-reading school in every city.