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Speed Reading Basics
Adding From Left to Right -- A Better Way to Add

 

Whether we're talking about a child or an adult, either at school or in the workplace, there are some very basic skills which are necessary for success.  Reading and Math are two of them. The more efficient we are at using these skills, the easier and faster we can solve our problems.  Speed reading and a different more efficient way of adding are advanced tools which could make a vast difference in the way we process things. The following articles will show us the way.

                                                             ........ June

 

 

Speed Reading Basics
by: Jonathan Mayheart
 

Speed reading is vital in today’s business and academic world, with the vast information that the internet offers, and the huge amounts of reading tasks an average manager or student faces, there is really no choice but to try and increase the intake of information.

In the last forty years there has a been an explosion of information, we are living the information revolution and that requires a lot of young professionals a great deal of effort in digesting this information and making good use of it.

Most of the people who attend speed reading courses and classes have some kind of problem, or believe they have some kind of problem, with their reading, here are a few of these potential problems.

Lack of concentration or partial/impaired concentration is an obvious problem for speed reading, the effects of the environment on ones reading rhythm and the general tendency of some people to be able of acceptable reading rate only in ideal situations. This problem is one of the basic speed reading problems and is usually dealt with in most courses.

Poor eye movement may cause some readers to shift their eyes to other directions and than go back to the book or paper to relocated the last point read. This problem also correlates with poor mechanical skills, which can be a real problem in speed reading.

Short attention span is a clear problem, almost everyone knows this problem, you start strong and begin to slow down as you read on. This kind of problem typically creates a situation of going back to re-read some lines over and over again, or a need to read the same sentence a couple of times for lack of understanding or loosing the line of thought altogether.

Reading by heart, when a person reads to himself (muttering the words or even reading out load) is an obvious problem since speed reading is much faster than talking, the reading out load inhibited the ability to read fast and also regulates a slow input of information into the cognitive.

Delayed reaction to information and material – This delay often comes from inattention, reading ahead or distraction. Desire to remember every word – This is loosely related to the tendency to re-read or slow down.

So what can you do to increase your reading skills? Do you really need to try speed reading you should you consider just eliminating some of these problems. The answer is most likely dependent of what you need, no matter what you problem is, you need to address the problem.

To try and read faster, here are a few tips that would get you going. Think of reading as a ‘pick and choose’ activity, where you can choose to read the words and phrases that are critical to comprehension, and skip over the connective tissue.

One major key in speed reading is filtering out all the words that has nothing to do with the subject and naturally, there a lot of them. All the connecting words, basically words that are there to connect one word with the other to make a sentence (TO make A sentence) the “and” “it’s” and “and’s” have got to go, just make yourself blind to them, go over these words and do not dwell on reading or noticing them.

Practicing time reading is also good, set up a timer and see how much you read in one minute, and in five minutes. Try and honestly estimate how much did you get from the text (make sure this is something you read for the first time), and try to beat yourself at this over and over again, until you start to feel that you have moved up one level. Experiment with different texts, and try to find books with text that has some questions about what you just read so you can apprise your understanding. Evaluate your situation every time you do this, reading faster sometimes mean that you will make more mistakes on understanding the subject, you should start making “mental notes” while reading so you will not fail answering the questions.

Train yourself to read more quickly by forced timing. If you are a runner, training for a race, you go out and run every day and you try to improve your time or your distance.

Set a timer and run a reading race every day for two to four weeks. You do not have to spend more than five minutes on this exercise. You may become frustrated, at first, by the fact that you cannot read as fast or remember as much as you would like.

Practice makes perfect, and this is the most basic thing you can do to increase your reading speed, in two weeks you should see some improvement, and you should work on the weaker aspects of your reading skills. This is the start of speed reading, and once you master the basics you will be on your way to becoming a speed reader.

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Jonathan Mayheart has been writing speed reading tips and advice for internet sites in the last few years. Jonathan currently writes Speed Reading http://speedreading.zupatips.com  articles for the tips and advice website http://www.ZupaTips.com .

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Adding From Left to Right -- A Better Way to Add
by: Peter Waycik
 

More than likely, when you learned how to add, you started on the right and moved to the left. If you were adding whole numbers, you added the ones, "carried" if necessary, and repeated for the tens, hundreds and so on. This works well on paper, and it is the most efficient paper and pencil method; however, adding in the other direction has several desirable advantages: the left to right method promotes a better understanding of place value, it can be done mentally with much greater ease, and it does not require that numbers be lined up in a column.

Article: More than likely, when you learned how to add, you started on the right and moved to the left. If you were adding whole numbers, you added the ones, "carried" if necessary, and repeated for the tens, hundreds and so on. This works well on paper, and it is the most efficient paper and pencil method; however, adding in the other direction has several desirable advantages: the left to right method promotes a better understanding of place value, it can be done mentally with much greater ease, and it does not require that numbers be lined up in a column. Students can learn left to right addition, so they have another method to choose from when presented with addition problems.

Left to right addition involves adding the largest place values first. As you move from left to right, you keep a cumulative total, so it is simply a number of smaller addition problems. To give you an idea of how it works and what it sounds like, consider the example, 677 + 938.

Begin by adding the left most place values. In the example this is 600 plus 900 equals 1500. Add the values in the next place, one at a time, to the previous sum, and keep track of the new sum each time. In the example, 1500 + 70 is 1570, 1570 + 30 is 1600. For students who are more proficient at this algorithm, they don't necessarily think "plus 70" or "add 30." Their thought process, if said out loud might sound like, "600, 1500, 1570, 1600, . . ." Continue adding the values in each subsequent place until finished. The final steps in the example are 1600 + 7 is 1607, 1607 plus 8 is 1615. The sum is 1615.

As you can imagine, students need to be proficient at single digit addition and have an understanding of place value before attempting left to right addition. When they are first learning it, they might try repeating sums as they go along (e.g. 1500, 1570, 1570, 1570, 1600, . . .) to help them retain the newest sums. They might also cross out digits as they are adding. There is no rule about having to add in this way mentally. Students could write down the sums as they proceed.

Left to right addition promotes a better understanding of place value than right to left addition. In right to left addition, single digits are carried or regrouped with little emphasis placed on what the value of those carried digits are. In the example, 1246 + 586, students add 6 + 6 to get 12; they write down the 2 and carry the 1 when they should be carrying the ten. In the next step, they add 8 + 4 + 1 to get 13; they write down the 3 and carry the 1 when they should be adding 80 + 40 + 10, writing the 3 in the tens place (i.e. 30) and carrying the hundred. Essentially, right to left addition excludes vocabulary related to place value. Left to right addition, on the other hand, promotes an understanding of place value as each digit is given its correct value. In the example, the one in the thousands place is one thousand, the two in the hundreds place is two hundred, and so on.

Left to right addition is well-suited to mental addition since the sum is cumulative with no steps in between; in other words, there is nothing for the student to keep in mind except for the cumulative sum. In right to left addition, several numbers must be remembered as the student proceeds. To illustrate this, consider the simple example, 64 + 88. In left to right addition, the sum is simple to find: 60, 140, 144, 152. Only one number had to be remembered at any point. In right to left addition, 4 + 8 is 12, so there are already two numbers to remember: the two in the ones place and the regrouped ten. The next step is to add 60 + 80 + 10 to get 150. At this point, the two must be recalled and added to the 150 to get 152. Although this sounds simple, it becomes more complicated with more digits.

Right to left addition does not require numbers to be lined up in a column, but it is often taught that way because the method tends to ignore place value and relies on a student's ability to line up the place values to compensate. Many errors that students make in right to left addition occur because they don't have a strong knowledge of place value, and they forget or don't realize that like place values need to be lined up. They might, for instance, add a digit in the tens place to a digit in the hundreds place. Another scenario is a sloppy recording of numbers where a digit is mistakenly added to the wrong column. In left to right addition, the emphasis is on finding a certain place value in each number rather than relying on the place values being aligned. Students, of course, need to be able to recognize place value before they can be successful at this method. For instance, they should be able to recognize that the ones in the numbers: 514, 1499, and 321 are in the tens, thousands, and ones places respectively. If they can't, further teaching on place value is required before addition can be taught effectively.

Although left to right addition has several advantages, it isn't suggested that you scrap everything else. Learning a wide variety of addition methods allows you latitude in problem solving situations. By teaching students this method, you give them another option when they are tackling addition questions.

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Peter Waycik is an elementary teacher and the creator of thousands of free math worksheets that can be found at his website: http://www.math-drills.com .

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