Reading is often discussed at the elementary levels. But what does a parent do to help reluctant readers in their teens? Or how about a college-bound high schooler getting ready for those tough entrance exams?
Three skills — accomplished through fun family activities — can help both groups reach their potential as readers. As a bonus, your kids' grades, even in math, are likely to improve from these efforts:
- Skim to find themes.
- Scan to find facts.
- Search to gather resources.
Skim to Find Themes
Choose a newspaper story that appeals to your child (articles on teenagers, sports or fashion will work just fine). Tell him to use his index finger to pull his eyes through the article as quickly as possible. Then ask what he thinks the article was about.
Show him how to use the headline as his first clue, the opening sentence as the second, and how to select key words with his eyes for the third.
Next, have him read another article using her regular reading strategies. Then reread the same passage, repeating the first step (placing her finger on the page to pull her eyes through the text). Was this method faster? Did he learn even more?
This skill works with any printed material. The technique works best when readers need to know general content, not details, or when they are reviewing material they have already read in preparation for a test.
Scan to find facts
An even faster method, scanning helps find specific facts that are buried in pages of more general information.
Using a passage you have read, instruct your teens to find one fact that you have already discovered in the text. This could be a statistic, a name, an important date, or the name of the town where someone was born. (Make it easy-this is simply a grown-up version of "Where's Waldo.")
Tell them what to look for. Remind them they do not need to know what the text says; they just need to find the fact. Use an index card to help them scan, and see how quickly they can locate the fact. This works best if you use specific words the first time you do this (find "Milwaukee" in this article), and then become more general as you practice (When was Kate Moss born?)
Search to Gather Resources
Much of the work done at the high school level requires research. For students who struggle to read, the amount of information that technology allows us to compile can be overwhelming. Use this exercise to teach students to gather the most relevant information.
Take a subject your teen loves and help him discover the many ways to find information on it (e.g. Internet search, online databases, wikipedia, google scholar, card catalogs, magazine searches). He does not need to write about or read any of what he finds--the exercise is simply to see how much he can find.
Help her narrow the topic she chooses or she will be overwhelmed with information. Does she love baseball? Encourage her to choose her favorite player or to limit the search to one season, and then begin. Has she chosen to research rock stars? Choose one artist and one year, then begin.
When searching for books in the card catalog or library database, choose a subject keyword that the catalog recognizes such as music or popular music. Ask your local librarian for assistance with this. After locating the books in the library, help your teen use the table of contents and the index to find the information they want. Once they have spotted it, they're done!
They do not need to read it. (I love to keep telling students this, because when they find it, they want to read it, and I keep saying, "Oh, but there's lots more--let's keep looking!")
With magazines and the Internet, encourage your student to identify specific titles that contain the required information. Again, encourage your student to save the reading until later. The key now is to learn how much information is available and how to conduct a search. This skill will put them light years ahead of their classmates when a research project is assigned.
Ginger Sisson is a teacher and media specialist at Grandville High School in Michigan.