How to improve your reading score

Many Children have trouble with reading. Reading is hard for some people and it can take time. Reading is a process of the brain where you look at symbols on a page, and your mind sees the patterns of characters and understands the meaning in them. If you develop good reading skills, it’ll be very helpful to your future. Aren’t your school teachers always saying ‘Read more books!’? Here are a few steps and tips to get started.

• Find a children’s book or a newspaper article, but…how?
  

–Go to the library and pick up lots of books. Pick books depending on your reading level, no matter what your age.

–Read about things that interest you. If you are interested in what you are reading about, the words will come alive, and you will be motivated to understand. You will feel satisfaction in accomplishing a task that you enjoy, and which you consider meaningful. The more you read, the better you will become at reading. Just get started and it will become a habit, as long as you are interested in what you are reading.

–Read material that is at your level, or just a little difficult for you. Read material that you find easy to read, or just a little challenging. Looking up many unknown words in a conventional dictionary is tedious, and the results of the dictionary search quickly forgotten. It is better to stay within your comfort zone and keep reading. Soon you will be able to take on more difficult content.

–Learn to read in depth, stay on the same subject for a while. If you are familiar with the subject you are reading about, you will understand better. Do not just read short articles. Commit to books. Stay with one author for at least one book. If the subject matter is new to you, you should even try to read a few different books or articles about the same subject, before you move on. This way you will meet the same vocabulary and ideas often, helping you to learn. You will also be able to get deeper into the subject and your reading confidence will grow.

• Find a place to read where you can concentrate. This may be someplace secret where no one will bother you, or simply your home at a time when it is quiet.
• Begin your reading by looking at the pictures, or listening to the music to get a feel for what you are going to be reading about.
  

–If you have trouble reading, listen first. Many great works of literature were written to be read out loud. Learn to appreciate the art of the narrator. Listen to audio books or audio files of the material that you are reading. This will help make difficult content seem more familiar. If you can hear the new words and phrases that you are reading, you will have an easier time understanding and remembering them. Hearing the rhythm of someone reading a text will help your own reading.

• Start with titles, names, or other larger print items that you may know or ever thought about.
• Read as much as you are able. When you start getting bored or need a break, take one. Reading should be fun and enjoyable, don’t force it. After your break, return to where you were, and continue.
  

–Let your imagination get involved. Good readers get engrossed in their reading and let it trigger their imagination. Learn to enjoy your reading.  Just enjoy and look forward to absorbing the information, ideas and thoughts expressed by the writer.

–Don’t worry about what you don’t understand. Most of your reading should be for pleasure. You can enjoy reading without understanding all of what you read. You may even understand some things in your own personal way. Neither you nor a teacher needs to “monitor” your understanding. Learn to enjoy reading, even while feeling that you do not fully understand or remember what you have read.

–Recognize that the key is to read a lot. You may develop a system for keeping track of new words that you encounter in your reading, using lists, or Flash Cards, or other memory systems available on the Internet or elsewhere. However, the main growth in your vocabulary and reading skill will come just from reading as much as you can. So learn to enjoy reading and read a lot. Keep reading, and you will become a better reader.

Unfortunately not all reading is just for pleasure. When you are reading a textbook or manual, or report or other material that have to read for school or work, you may need to underline, take notes, and read some parts over again, in order to retain what you are reading. However, if you have developed the habit of reading for pleasure, you will find that the cognitive techniques you need will come naturally, and that you will understand a lot better than before.

• Reread the material. It is okay to reread something if you do not understand it fully the first time. Just read over the sentence(s) again. Try reading the words out loud to yourself. If you still don’t understand something, ask a good reader nearby to explain the sentence(s) to you, or simply pick up a book that is easier to read and more appropriate to your reading level. Feel free to use your finger as a pointer. It will keep your eyes focused on the line you are reading, improving your understanding.
• Read the page carefully. Don’t rush, take your time. Most people think that skimming the page(skimming means to just scan the whole page and hardly take in a couple of words)is a way of fast reading, but this is definitely not true.
• Use context clues to find out a word’s meaning. Context clues are when a person figures out the meaning of a word by seeing how the word was used in a sentence. For example, you were reading the following sentence and wanted to know what ‘pessimist’ means:My mother is always happy and optimistic, the total opposite of my brother, the pessimist. So from the sentence, you can gather that ‘pessimist’ means the opposite of happy, so pessimist means being moody and angry. Good, experienced readers always use context clues! If you find a word that you’re totally stumped on, use the dictionary! If you want to save time and the hassle of turning pages, go to the online dictionary.
• Keep reading! Try to read as much as you can on your free time. Reading will help you in lots of ways; your vocabulary will become larger and more sophisticated and you will notice your grades change for the better in school. Have fun reading!