Speed Reading – set up in a flash

Improving comprehension of words is obviously the main aid to reading, but another aspect of reading is training students to read faster.

I came across a great website that allows you to set up your own speed reading exercises for free at www.spreeder.com/app.php

Here is a way to get elementary level students to practice some speed reading exercises:

1.       Get the students to go to http://www.btinternet.com/~ted.power/firstr01.html to grab some low level vocab for reading.

2.       Students then go here to paste in the text: http://www.spreeder.com/app.php

3.       Set the words per minute (wpm), chunking (1,2,3 etc words), font size etc.

4.       Click on spreed!

A really great bonus of this site is the benefit for students who have reading difficulty and need large size writing. These are the settings that can be adjusted:

Spreeder settings

 

Students can highlight any vocabulary in the webpage, click on the Spreed bookmark spreeder bookmark and read it in huge font size – even size 200!

To train to read faster, you must first find your base rate. Your base rate is the speed that you can read a passage of text with full comprehension. We’ve defaulted to 300 wpm, showing one word at a time, which is about the average that works best for our users. Now, read that passage using spreeder at that base rate.

After you’ve finished, double that speed by going to the Settings and changing the Words Per Minute value. Reread the passage. You shouldn’t expect to understand everything – in fact, more likely than not you’ll only catch a couple words here and there. If you have high comprehension, that probably means that you need to set your base rate higher and rerun this test again. You should be straining to keep up with the speed of the words flashing by. This speed should be faster than your inner voice can “read”.

Now, reread the passage again at your base rate. It should feel a lot slower (if not, try running the speed test again). Now try moving up to a little past your base rate (for example, 400 wpm), and see how much you can comprehend at that speed.

That’s basically it – constantly read passages at a rate faster than you can keep up, and keep pushing the edge of what you’re capable of. You’ll find that when you drop down to lower speeds, you’ll be able to pick up much more than you would have thought possible.

From : http://www.spreeder.com/

Challenge your students to increase their wpm!

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