The good news is that if you are committed and actually do work, you can develop your own speed-reading program at home. You can greatly increase your reading speed without sacrificing comprehension.

How do you start to improve your reading speed? The first step is to determine what your current reading speed is.

Find some reading material to practice with, such as an article in a magazine, or use a chapter of a book. Set a timer for a short period, such as five or ten minutes. Start reading at your regular speed, and see how far you can get in time allotted. Do not try to read faster or slower than normal; object here is to find out what your regular reading speed is. When time is finished, mark page so you know exactly how far you read. You will need to count how many words you read in this amount of time.

Now, using same article set timer again, for same number of minutes. Start at point in your article where you left off last time. Do not re-read exactly same material that you have just finished.

This time, concentrate on reading much faster than you did first time. Go as fast as you can while still taking in every word and maintaining your comprehension. Calculate your reading speed and compare it to your first effort. Did your score improve? Try again, striving to read even faster without sacrificing comprehension.

If your performance has measurably speeded up, notice whether you feel relaxed or tense. Are you telling yourself that reading fast is hard? Many of roadblocks you face in going faster are mental, in your mind, and can be changed.

Many people have developed bad reading habits that slow them down. See if you make any of following errors.

When you read, do you read word for word? Or do you sweep your eyes across phrases and sentences? Trying to take in every single word will slow you down and even interfere with your comprehension. Why? Because in English language, meaning of sentences is built up from groups of words, from way phrases and clauses are put together. Halting at every single word can keep you from absorbing meaning of entire sentence.

You can actually take in meaning of a sentence better by using your eyes to sweep across phrases and clauses, rather than slowing down to take in each word separately.

If you find yourself immersed in violin tuning, violin fingering charts and perhaps Suzuki music you may find following helpful.

This short article is first in a series aimed at shedding some light on this mystery of encouraging your child to enjoy, maybe even look forward to violin practice time.

If you can relate to any of following statements, please don’t tell rest of us!

1. My child is so motivated to practice her violin, she will go to bed early in order to awake and be ready for practice at 6:00 am.

2. My son quit soccer team because it was cutting into his violin practice time. 3. I often spend many hours online searching for free violin sheet music just to satisfy my daughter’s unquenchable thirst for new music. She loves challenge!

4. We cancelled our family trip to Hawaii because our son just couldn’t bear fact that he would miss two violin lessons. He’s just s-o-o-o motivated and we don’t want to break that spirit in him.

5. Violin tuning has become a fun family event, we all love to get involved.

6. My daughter is learning about fractions by memorizing different violin sizes, 1/16, 1/10, ¼, who know fractions could be so much fun?!

For rest (probably 99.99%) of us, let me assure you, there is hope! Chances are, we may never be able to claim any one of four statements above, but there are positive, fun methods of encouraging your child to practice without pain to them or you.

Time of day. Three little words that pack a huge punch when it comes to creating an effective practice time. Two things you need to consider are: 1. Your child’s age 2. Observe what time of day they have highest level of concentration.