Many new readers struggle with reading quickly and smoothly. Being able to improve your reading speed will lead to better reading fluency and reading comprehension. Children often get practice and guidance with improving their reading speed at school. With so many school closures across the country, many children who are struggling with reading are left without any appropriate reading instruction to help them improve.
However, you can still help your child improve their reading skills using reading apps to supplement their learning. These reading apps that help you improve your reading speed are great to use in addition to a regular reading program.
How fast should I be reading?
Reading speed is the number of words you are able to recognize per minute and the percentage of comprehension of the material. The average reader can read 250 words per minute with 60% reading comprehension. The top readers can reach 1,000 words per minute with 85% comprehension.
Improving reading speed can help your child understand reading materials better and faster. It will help them to be able to get through school work faster and more efficiently in the future.
How do you improve reading speed?
Improving reading speed is relatively easy to learn, especially for young children. Children, in general, learn things quicker and better than adults, so improving your child’s reading speed can be done easily at home.
According to a speed-reading instructor, George Stancliffe, there are four key components to speed reading:
- Natural vision – being able to see more than one word at once. Natural vision means to extend just seeing three or four words when you look at a passage. You should be able to see lines of words.
- Visualization – picturing the story in your mind as if it is a movie.
- Relax – being relaxed when reading and visualizing. Many people read with intense concentration, but Stancliffe encourages them to focus on relaxing to get maximum visualization and concentration.
- Daily Practice – exercising discipline and practicing speed-reading every day. Practice makes perfect!
These key factors can help your child learn not just to improve their reading speed but also to improve their reading comprehension and learn to read thoughtfully. Of course, discipline alone can make it difficult for children to be motivated to read.
Especially now, children are more distracted than ever and leaning on digital devices. If you find your child has increased their screen time, you can at least make their time on their tablets educational by downloading some reading apps that can help them improve their reading speed and skills.
What apps improve reading speed?
Improving reading speed takes practice, but using some reading apps can help with enhancing the skills needed to speed read.
- Readability – Readability is a great app for general reading practice for your child. Most importantly, it will improve reading speed because it essentially works as a private reading tutor for your child. Through A.I. and speech-recognition, the app listens to your child read and gives them instant feedback for error correction. The app also gives you a progress report so you can see your child’s progress.
- Sight Words – A huge part of improving reading speed is building vocabulary. Sight Words helps your child increase their vocabulary so that they are able to recognize more words quickly. The app uses word games and fun graphics to keep children engaged and having fun while they learn.
- Chicktionary – Chicktionary is another reading app that uses games to help your child learn new words. In the game, your child must arrange the chickens to spell the words correctly. This cheeky, fun game will make your kids laugh as they learn.
- Spreeder – Spreeder is a great app to help improve reading speed for both children and adults. You can input any text into the app and set the pace of the reader. The app will then play the text word by word as a video so you can see how quickly you are able to read each word to understand the full sentence.
- Read Eye – This app is a similar reading speed app as Spreeder. You can input any text you like and it will play it across the screen so you can see how slow or quickly you are able to read the text.
- Reading Trainer – This speed reading app works by first measuring your current reading speed. The app gives you a text to read and times you while you read it, then you must answer a short quiz about the reading to see how much you understand the reading. This is a great app to not only measure how quickly your child recognizes words but also their reading comprehension.
Improving your child’s reading speed during this time can be a simple way to keep them on track with their learning. Using these reading apps like Readability, they can learn to be a better reader while having fun at the same time. Reading has never been more fun and easy!
