EXPERIMENT; Your Baby Can Read!

Today Mitchell is working until dinner time. Yesterday was unproductive; I didn't get anything done at all. Today probably won't be much different, despite the ever increasing number of things I need to do today. I DO plan on posting twice today, but I also want to fill out our health insurance paperwork, get more laundry done, wash the dishes, and vacuum. We will see what gets done. I have a project I want to try.



I wanted to say a few things about this program called "Your baby can read". Are you wondering if this idea works? Well, it probably does for many kids. But I would think the way your child learns affects whether this would work or not. Check out "Yourbabycanread.com".



So, I have decided to work really hard to teach Mason (age 2.5) and Zander (age 1.5) to "read" some words. The two boys learn differently, and have different strengths, phonically. Zander talks well for his age group, and learns from repetition. Mason had a speech delay (though is now caught up to his peers) and learns better from physical/visual examples.



So, today I will post piece of paper on the door (it's in the center of the living room) with two words on it. I will point to the words several times throughout the day and say the words while making good eye contact with each child. I will also show them pictures or the actual objects.



At the end of the day, I will ask Mason what each word is. I will ask Zander to show me what the word is, for example, by placing the object near one of the words.



The idea behind this is that they learn to recognize the shape of the word, because this is how reading begins. They recognize letters, shape of words, etc. until it starts making sense that the word is actually made up of different letters (separating the letters in a big word is too complicated for a child under 3, in my opinion) and every couple of days we will choose a letter to practice the sounds of, so when we are ready to sound out words, they will know what sounds the letters make.



If I make progress, I will also be buying the "your baby can read" system. Why not? I am a firm believer that early reading makes education easier. I was an early reader. I could read before kindergarten and could read better than the majority of my peers. This made school easier for me, and I still enjoy reading (though I mostly like to read junk, lol). The fact that I can read and retain information from reading so well made college a great deal easier, too.





I have chosen to begin with the words "Ball" and "Cup". We will also go over the "b" sounds, since it begins one of our words. I will post about how this goes as much as I can. I have a feeling this will work, because I have experienced teaching Joey (now age 10) to read, and he is in 4th grade, reading at a 7th grade level. He loves to read. We did something very similar to this. He was around 3 years old, and I would pick a sentence out of his favorite book and we would practice it, until he had memorized the whole book. Then I took words form those sentences and made games from them. I will do that, too, but I don't want to overwhelm my toddlers. Let's just see how each kid does with this.