Those ah-hahs!!!! are insightful aren't they. I ask my students to make a note of them to remember them after the class. So they can review and apply what they learned. You've made a nice record of them here on the forum. Thanks for sharing.
Yes, a big key is your purpose.
As far as I know there are no PhotoReading instructors in India. yet. Our certified instructors are listed here
http://www.learningstrategies.com/PhotoReading/Seminar2.asp#middle Might be one of those instructors is presenting seminars over there so check it out.
It does pay to revisit the course after a while. One does pick up new ideas. Or connect to the ones they missed.
About teaching kids. It doesn't hurt to expose them at a young age. My niece and nephew got to watch me flipping pages of books and lots of them. Paul's kids were handling and flipping books as tots. They loved going to the library and borrowing books.
Kids still need to read and the primary / elementary reading skills taught in school are necessary. You cannot really bypass that. Once they enter high school they need a better approach to reading so when they have year 9 reading or about 13 years of age they have 80% of their reading vocabulary.
To help children read it's best to read to them. And believe it or not nonsense books like those by Dr Seuss are excellent. They build comprehension skills that rote reading and sounding out of words does not. So reading nursery rhymes, singing nonsense songs and rhyming books are great to read to children before they start school and read and follow along as they get older. Read other story books and pause to ask, 'what do you think is going to happen next?' and let the child tell you before you turn the page to find out. Is a secret of helping a child to learn to read for meaning and comprehension.
Reading a book is like solving a mystery. You try to guess what the author will say next. You read on to find out if you were right or how close to right you were. That's especially true for novels. It's the reason we often watch a movie to the end. We want to know what happens next.
Children don't often get a chance to learn this so reading for them is just saying one word after another and it makes no sense.
If you start the child reading out loud, she will make mistakes, the trick is not to correct those mistakes. The reason being correcting the mistakes slows down reading
so
it
becomes
as
bad
as
reading
a
List.
If you read that out loud you'll hear the way a child reads. Notice it's hard to get comprehension out of reading a list.
So don't correct the mistakes too fast. Let the reading flow and the child discover the sentence was wrong because she read it wrong. If you do go back and correct it. Read the whole sentence.
Also don't let the child struggle to read a word, as soon as they get stuck, say the word. Again it's so the sentence can flow.
Comprehension comes from reading for meaning. It's not about the single words. So if you want your child to have ease with reading, make learning to read fun, cut the struggle and let the sentences flow.
Alex
