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!

“Does this method work? How did your kids do? When did they learn to read? When did you introduce sentences/phrases/books?” Everyone who is teaching their own kids is burning to hear some anwers to those questions. Thanks to Laurie, the amazing mother who is homeschooling 10 kids, and a moderator in TeachYourBabyToRead yahoo group, for sharing this!!!

Thanks to A.P.P. for sharing this fantastic list of kids book recomendations!  Please share your own favorites/dislikes at the end!

*Another Proud Papa’s list of classic picture storybooks*

This is my list of “classic” picture books.  This includes only storybooks—no nonfiction.  I have omitted books that my little boy likes, but which I don’t think are actually “classics” or especially popular.  As to their age level or difficulty, they are two steps more advanced than infant/baby cloth books, one step more advanced than board books and very
simple books like the (great-for-one-year-olds) *Biscuit* series and *Freight Train.*  They typically have a clear plot, and vocabulary that is usually well above *Dick and Jane.*  But (with one exception) they are not “chapter books,” they are picture books.

*Top 10 (for our boy, between ages 1¾ to 2¾) in alphabetical order*