Charlie Reads SmarT for APH 262 & SPA 301

Hello again! This week I'd like to discuss Charlie Reads SmarT. Do long reading assignments make you cringe? Do you get easily distracted while reading? Do your readings feel so overwhelming that you decide to not do them at all? Well this strategy is absolutely perfect for you!

This strategy makes me almost wish I had a class with long chapter readings. I know how tedious those can be! However, I found that thisstrategy can really be adapted to work with all types of readings. For example, I used this strategy for my Spanish 301 class where we read multiple short stories every week.

First, I took a look at the reading and figured out exactly how long the short story was. Because the story was four pages long, I decided to chunk my reading by reading one page at a time throughout the day. This is what each chunk would look like:

This strategy especially works well with languages because dividing the reading up allows you to digest and understand the reading and the language without getting frustrated.

The next step is to *Summarize*. You can do this in many ways, however since this reading is in a different language, I decided to highlight words I did not know and find out the definition to each. These are my key words; by highlighting them they stand out and I will be able to remember them to use in the future in Spanish:

Lastly, test yourself! I'm a visual and kinesthetic learner, so I wasn't quite sure how this strategy would work for me until I reached this step. For this step I created (kinesthetic) note cards to help me memorize the definitions of the words I highlighted (visual). I also created a couple of questions that would keep me prepared should we have an essay test on this particular story:

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Secondly, I used the same strategy for my Art Photography class. We're required to read many tutorials that explain different techniques in Photoshop and as you can imagine, the readings can feel quite boring and a bit complicated.

So, I took one of my tutorials and chunked it into different sections just as I did with my Spanish reading. This reading was especially easy to chunk because it was already broken up into different sections based on different photoshop tools:

I then tested myself by trying out the technique:

This also works to summarize my work because it shows a side by side comparison of what I did to correct the image.

Overall I believe this strategy was more effective in breaking down my Spanish reading. I was really able to fully understand what was going on in the short story while learning new vocabulary and not getting frustrated. My tutorials for my Art Photography class almost already work in the way Charlie Read Smart does, so I didn't have to adapt much!