Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum another sightreading question

I brought up this topic in another longer post but it didn't seem to catch any interest so I'll just try again with emphasis on a single, short question: would you suggest/do you find better results in sightreading improvement by attempting to read everything as correctly as possible, even if this means going extremely slowly, or reading "at speed" come heck or high water, just plowing thru/playing less of the notes/ignoring measures that aren't "happening" at tempo?

At speed, but choose material that you can handle reasonably well.

I agree - you have to begin with pieces that are rather simple. When you start feeling comfortable with such pieces (and you have time to 'react' not only to the notes, but also to the character, dynamics and articulation), you can gradually move on to something more complicated. Just practice every day (without forgetting about the other aspects of a correct piano practice - learning in detail some pieces, working on your posture, sound and technique) and after a while you'll see some good results!

You need to start with very simple pieces that you can keep a constant rhythm too, and then increase the difficulty in pieces as you go along.
Before you play, make sure you check for time & key signatures, so scan through the piece and look for any repetitive patterns that very often occur, maybe play through a few of these, and look out for things like rests and changes in key e.t.c. that could possibly trip you up.

I need both. I need to play at pace in order to improve the speed of my sight reading and I need slowly and accurately in order to improve the accuracy of my sight reading.

Speed also helps my understanding of rhythms, while playing slowly and carefully helps me to notice other details like duration of notes.