Classic Toys For Tots

Educational Toys – Teaching your toddler to read

Recently, I’ve been pondering about teaching my son to read. When I shared my thoughts with people around me, they were surprised that I’m considering doing that in such a young age (28 months). My gut feeling was that it is the right time since in the last few months my son has been eager to learn letters and was absorbing new information like a sponge. in addition, he loves books and is asking us to read him stories many times during the day and memorize them. I had my doubts, though, since I try not to be a “pushy” mom and it is important to me to be tuned in to his needs and feelings and make educational decisions accordingly.

Picture taken from parentsprecinct.com

Eventually, I figured that my son’s behavior signals  that he is up for the challenge and decided to make some small first steps towards this goal. At first I bought him the Magnetic Alphabet toy to help him learn the phonics and thought of buying some Flash cards with words and pictures, than I thought of placing words on objects in the house so he will eventually make the connection between them; but I didn’t really have a solid plan for teaching him.

It happens that on the same week I stumbled upon an article that challenged the idea of babies and toddlers ability to read. Obviously it immediately caught my attention… In this article there was some information and a link to a program which is called: “Your Baby Can Read”. This is a program which is based on Dr. Titzer’s research of Infant learning and designed for teaching children to read starting from infancy (around 3 months). the videos of the reading children in his site were very convincing and after reading and watching some videos of Dr. Titzer interviews I realized  it’s worth trying.

The price for buying the full kit is $199.95 but they also offer a 30 day trial for $14.95. I decided to give it a try and see how my toddler reacts to it. According to Dr. Titzer videos 75% of our brain develops by the age of 2 and 90% of it develops by the age of 5. He claims that there is a natural window of opportunity for teaching the child to read that starts to close around the age of 4 and therefore it is much harder to acquire the same skill later on. After watching videos of 9-18 months old reading babies, a funny thought hit me – my son is one of the “older” candidates for this program. On one second I felt that I might be starting too early, and on the second, I felt like time is too precious to waist. I already pictured him sitting in a classroom at the age of 6 sweating his way to learn how to read when the window is already closed; and on the other end, imagined him at the age of 3 surrounded with books and happily reading Dostoevsky (not really) -but I do believe there was a soft music on the background…

Picture taken from closedstacks

So I purchased the trial  kit and after a few days it arrived in a heavy box. I must say I was impressed with the content of the package. It contained 5 DVDs with 5 matching sliding card sets, 50 Word game Cards, 82 Double sided Word cards, 5 Lift A Flap books, window book, music DVD and parents guide/workshop (book and DVD). All in very good quality and appealing to the eye.

The Idea behind this program is that if you expose the child from a young age to words accompanied with other simulations such as movements and photos, he will at first memorize these words and later on will understand the patterns and sounds of the words and letters and will be able to read words that he has never seen before.

It all made sense to me as it is very natural to remember information better when it is accompanied with a sensor stimulation and there are so many examples of people who learned languages as children with no effort that you cannot argue with.

We started following this program a week ago and I was thinking it will be interesting to document the progress of my son weekly as a service to the people who are considering to try this program as well and as a way to keep a journal of the process.

During the last week, he watched the starter DVD (one out of five) twice a day as instructed. He is supposed to watch it for a month until moving to the next one (this is approximately the time that takes to learn the first words). In addition, it is recommended to read with him daily the starter book and play with the matching cards but I wasn’t following it strictly until now. He is very fond of this DVD. He requests to watch it twice a day – first when he wakes up and also when he comes back from daycare, which is terrific since I don’t need to make him watch it, he loves watching it. Since he is already a toddler and has a large vocabulary, it is easy for him to recognize the words and follow the simple instructions (such as: “arms up”) but the challenge is to recognize the written words.  in the first five days I didn’t see any sign of him recognizing the words (which was understandable), but in the last 2 days he randomly recognizes a word, but not necessarily could repeat when I ask him again. This is an encouraging sign for me to see that he is in the process of taking in the information. I’m aware to the fact that it might take weeks until I will be able to see and measure the results but I can already see that he is processing the information and more importantly find enjoyment while doing so.

I will be recording his progress weekly through these blog posts hoping you will find it helpful. To be continued…