It seems that there are as many ways to teach a child to read, as there are children: some learn by phonics, some by whole words; some have special books, some have special letter magnets, some have syllable blocks, some have flash cards; some do it with their parents, some learn in school, some might even learn all by themselves! So, which method to chose? Which one is the best?

I think it depends on a child, I think it depends on a parent. I’ve heard opposing views for every single method. So, select the one that appeals to you and your child the most:

• Glenn Doman, whole word cards: brief summary & jump start teaching to read and FAQ, or if you are looking for some materials, proceed to the PowerPoint presentations: Word/Phrases/Sentences cards, or Books, or even Encyclopedic Knowledge Books.
• Phonics
• Combination of Doman and Phonics methods
• Methods applicable to teaching to read in Russian
• Teach Your Child with Multimedia: educational dvds, toys, websites, etc

You can read my personal reasons for selecting a particular reading method or see comments below for other paren’ts experiences, and please share your own!

Thanks to Krista (the creator of MonkiSee DVD series) for sharing her own road to success: How did I teach my kids to read.

Thanks to Laurie (the moderator of TeachYourBabyToRead) for sharing her own approach and ideas: Teaching kids to read with written conversations

I started showing word cards to my older son when he was about 6 months. He wasn’t really interested. So, I came up with a thousands of ways to get his attention: we were vacuum cleaning the words, wiping it, jumping over them, doing forward rolls, watching them in the car, hanging in the hallway (see more at Alternative Ways of Showing Cards to An Active Child)… With my first one I was freaking out all the time: “Is it working?”, “Is he learning?”, “Why he is just looking at the pictures in the books and not reading it?!”.

I feel like a silly writer-character in the old joke, who gets so many positive responses for his own novel, that decides to go and read it himself. I’ve passed on the recommendations to get Signing Times videos to many-many-many parents, who later became huge fans of these videos. Recently I found them on the YouTube: Caterpillar Dreams. I was enchanted: beautiful singing, excellent signing (yep, siGNing), charming illustrations, adorable kids. What more could you expect? But that’s not all! I really love that all the words in the songs are shown as signs, not only “key words”, so a lot more signs are picked up along the way. I absolutely love, that while new signs are introduced, the words are written on the screen, so it aids learning to read as well! This video definitely deserves two thumbs up! (Oh-oh, I should go and find the video with the right sign…)

I’m going against the Doman grain here, but my own method did involve constantly “testing” the young reader, in a way. We began at age 22 months, and he was able to pronounce all of the (simple) words on the cards. So I was not just showing the cards. But it wasn’t as brutal as it may sound. We took it in stages and I was gentle every step of the way. Also, background: I went whole card set by whole card set, rather than adding new individual cards and retiring old.

Thanks to Fátima for sharing these beautiful Spanish presentations! They all contain gorgeous high quality images, well selected words and terrific reading by a native speaker. These presentations were developed based on the presentations at the Tar Heel Reader ppt. Thank you so much for sharing these!

Special thanks to Spanish Google Group “aprender jugando con Doman” for assembling together the wonderful audio books. “aprender jugando con Doman” is cordially inviting everyone to join!

Links to books on the pages of ChildAndMe
Links to all Fátima’s files

Thanks to A.P.P. for sharing this!

Review of “Ready to Read?” by Vicki Glembocki in the October 2009 issue of
*Parents*.

The article is very helpful in that it encapsulates, in a relatively short space, all of the prejudice, confusion, and lack of knowledge that surrounds the issue of teaching kids to read at an early age. It is basically “the party line,” and will be comforting to those parents who don’t want to take the time to investigate things themselves, and who are philosophically opposed to much early education in the first place. It comes out firmly against any efforts to teach children to read before the usual age of 5-6, quoting Elkind and Hirsh-Pasek. In fairness, I should say that it does have some useful information about the importance of learning vocabulary for learning to read–but then, I think that’s nothing new to Doman parents, who are teaching their kids vocabulary words and phrases all the time.

I was looking for another fun component for our reading. Reading in Russian is taking a lot of efforts, so I wanted to show my son, that reading can be jut fun!

1. I printed out Introductory Words, took the first five, we read them together and applied them all over the house: “Television” went onto the TV, “door” – on the door, etc.
2. The next day, when the baby was sleeping I took all the words down and pretended some naughty magical dwarf messed it all up. My kid had a blast hanging it all back. I repeated this reshuffling of the words for a few days.

For those interested to see all the English words used in the presentations for Single Words, Couplets, Phrases, etc. – there is an MS Excel file available at the site: List of All Words. I’ll be updating this file every time I upload a new set of words.

… so, a month ago, we launched into an exciting journey: watching a little adorable newborn grow, and help him develop his potential to the fullest extent! We found many interesting books, methods, ideas and here I continue the description of the ones we’ve tried and how it worked for us.

• Newborn – first month
• 1 month old miracle!
• 2 months old giraffe hunter
• Hang on there! Three months old hanging for 12 seconds!