Age Group:
Elementary School
Middle School
High School

How do you use this reading approach?
Skimming is an age-old method that truly has gotten a bad rap. Many teachers consider it cheating, but the best students at top institutions of higher learning do it every day with pride. It's simple to do. Rather than having your child read every word of a book or chapter, have them read the introduction and conclusion first. If it is a chapter, this will just be the first paragraph and the last -- often labeled in textbooks as "introduction" and "conclusion." If the assignment is to read the whole book, then this is the first and last chapters. After getting an overview of main ideas, they then read the topic and concluding sentences of each paragraph -- the first and last respectfully. Lastly, they go through the text reading any bold, underlined, or italicized word or terms.

Other important information:
It's important to note that this type of reading is for non-fiction textbooks. Moreover, this is a reading structure that can be tailored to how much or how little your child needs to know about the text in question. If they need to only know enough information to talk intelligently about the reading in class, all they need to do is read the introduction and conclusion. The more they need to know, the more they read.

The above information was written by Jonathan Mooney.