Speed Reading Tales

Early Learning Teaching Your Child to Read
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Awhile back we were discussing on Facebook speed reading, and the different methods. One method starts by taking a story or text of some sort and flashing one word of the text at a time. Eventually to increase your speed you add a second word so that two words flash at a time. You continue this increase to three, four and eventually sentences, paragraphs and so on. Now this method is used on adults and there are lots of different software used for free to use this method. I used the method for myself, and I was able to increase my reading speed.

It was suggested to take familiar stories to your children and turn them into speed reading tales. I have done that with a couple of stories from Beatrix Potter. They are in the public domain, so it is easy to share.

I also had a thought that this could be a more preferable way for a child/baby to be flashed words in order to learn to read. I know that some people have had difficulty in capturing their children’s attention when flashing words on the screen. I would love to know the thoughts of more people. I would also love to know if your children found the videos enjoyable. Did they like it after the first showing? Did their interest wane after a few showing? That kind of thing.

The videos do not have audio and are meant to be read by a parent and then eventually to be read silently. I am not sure how long to read them aloud. It really is at this point just an interesting experiment to me. Eventually, I want to do stories with two words flashing, but I am not at all sure when to do this.

Here are my first two videos. I have plans to do more, but I am looking for short stories in the public domain with pictures. I think the pictures are nice and help to keep the attention and delight of the child, but that is my personal opinion. I really want to hear the opinion of others.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8M5o7a4K25M&feature=youtu.be

http://youtu.be/sS7n9lmK4PA

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My boy loved it, but I think we’ll use the power point and click through instead of auto forward, because we like looking and talking about pictures.

I hope you make many, they are lovely, and I also think it’s a very good way of flashing words to non readers. :yes:

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Thank you for sharing. I’ll watch it with my five year old later today.

We’ve been working on something called precision reading - it’s basically repeated readings of the same passage, each time reading farther and with greater accuracy - ending with a few comprehension questions. Today, for some reason, he didn’t want to read a different passage aloud (he reads aloud daily…not just during the precision training time), so I allowed him to read silently, I was reading it silently myself and watching him as his eyes moved through the paragraphs and columns. He was reading slightly slower than my speed, but has made excellent improvement from when we started this experiment.

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This is essentially the RSVP technique: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_serial_visual_presentation

It’s shown to be effective for short and simple texts, with modest speed improvements. I’m not sure whether it’s effective for long or complicated texts. Nevertheless, it’s worth trying.