Struggling With Note-Taking, Reading Comprehension & Listening Comprehension?

July 30th, 2010

Bonnie,

I found you through Youtube and am intrigued by the 10 Minutes to Better Study Skills!

My home-schooled daughter is 16 and dual-enrolling in our local community college and currently in her first class.

She is struggling with note-taking! She also took the SAT in June and scored poorly in the reading portion, especially the “passage” reading. I’m beginning to make the connection with these two problems… there seems to be a struggle, for her, in pulling out keys points in a written document, or passage, and in an oral lecture.

She tends to want to write down too much from a lecture and gets overwhelmed when given a passage to read with questions to answer, especially when timed. For writing assignments, she is gifted in vocabulary usage, spelling and grammar, but the process of writing becomes a long, drawn-out process.

She wants to “hover” over a slew of ideas but struggles to land the plane. When she does land the plane, it will take hours.

Will your book and the forms therein help us?

Karen McGold

Karen,

There is a direct connection with the ability to pull out the main idea and important details and note-taking. You want to be sure the notes you take are meaningful and when you don’t know how to quickly pull out that information from either reading a passage or listening to a lecture, you are ‘sunk’.

That is one of the specific reasons I designed the graphic organizers in Ten Minutes to Better Study Skills in the manner that I did. These forms not only help you with note-taking, they also become a ‘study-guide’ for you when you are reviewing the material or answering the questions at the end of a section or chapter. They can also be used to learn how to take notes while listening to a lecture or presentation.

The graphic organizer fill-in-the-blank forms are designed specifically with your daughter in mind.

Another product that will also help her is our game the Comprehension Zone because it teaches you specifically how to pull out the main idea, details, and sequence what you read or listen to in a game format. It can be played for both reading or listening comprehension. Playing with the skill, practicing the skill through play, and then utilizing the Ten Minutes to Better Study Skills will go a long way in teaching her those missing skills.