Have you ever opened to the first page of an assigned reading and thought, “Ugh. How am I possibly going to focus? It looks sooooooo boring!”
Well, here’s a tip that I recommend to my clients. Maybe it will work for you?
Hey there, don’t have time for the full video? No worries, here’s a short summary:
Do you ever have to read a book for school… and you just can’t seem to get through the first paragraph, let alone the first few pages? Well, I recently had this experience, and I want to tell you about it because I think I found a way to make reading that I don’t necessarily want to do, a little more interesting. First though, a little backstory. I have a client who doesn’t have that much to do in our sessions, so we decided to have her read Animal Farm to help increase her reading level – as she’s prone to reading lower level books, specifically the Warriors series. To help incentivize her to read Animal Farm, I promised her I’d read Warriors while she was reading Animal Farm. The problem was, I just… couldn’t stand this book. The first few paragraphs I just couldn’t get into. There were too many names, like “Lionheart” and “Ravenclaw” and all these people I just couldn’t track – not to mention I just didn’t care about these characters. However, I promised this young woman I’d read the book, and I know that this is the same experience kids all over the country are having with their assigned reading, so I felt I owed it to you all to read it.
So the first thing I did was I found a summary online of the book. Then as I read the summary I made a drawing of the summary. I drew a thundercloud and lightning for the “Thunder Clan” and a river for the “River Clan”, and below these images, I outlined some of the characters and which side they were on. This drawing helped me understand the layout of the book and the characters better so I could read the book more efficiently and grasp what I was having a hard time with. So don’t be afraid to read summaries and use creativity to help you lay the groundwork for your reading.
Need more help learning how to handle massive amounts of reading in high school, college or grad school? Or perhaps you can read just fine, but have no clue how to actually remember what you read? Check out my course.