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Since I’ve been looking into reading, I’ve found lots of kinds of reading strategies to help you understand and remember. Good reading strategies don’t just help you read on the GED test… they also help you study! Here’s a great reading strategy for GED preparation, called SQ4R.

SQ4R stands for “Survey, Question, Read, Respond, Review, Reflect.” This is really good for reading study books. Here’s what you do:

1) Survey

Don’t start reading right away! Instead, you look at the page. What are the titles? Headings? Bold words? Pictures? Captions? Graphs? Look at the big things on the page, and try to get an idea what it’s all about.

2) Question

Don’t start reading yet! Based on what you looked at in your survey, ask some questions. What do you want to know? If it’s your book, write questions on the page, next to the title and pictures. Or, you can write on a piece of paper. Ask as many questions as you can think of.

3) Read

Now it’s time to read! If it’s your book, underline things, circle new words, and write down ideas while you read. If it’s not your book, write notes on a piece of paper. This is active reading… you’re thinking while you’re reading!

4) Respond

While you’re reading, you want to find the answers to your questions, too. You either have your questions written on the page or on a separate paper. Now, write the answers that you find by the questions.

5) Review

After you’re done reading, look back at what you did. Look over the pages you read. Did you find all the answers to your questions? Did you miss anything? Do you understand what you read? Do you have some new questions?

6) Reflect

Put what you read away. Now, stop and think about it. Talk about it with a friend, or write a diary entry about what you think. Do you agree with what was said? Did you find something interesting or new? Did you learn something? Are you still confused about anything?

Give this SQ4R a try… I’m going to use it for looking at a web page. Becca said I should take a look at this one: http://memory.loc.gov/learn/features/timeline/depwwii/dustbowl/dustbowl.html

It’s about the Dust Bowl in the 1930s in America. I don’t think I ever heard of that. I’ll try to learn about it, and I’ll let you know how I did the SQ4R reading.

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