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…)

Read more…

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.

Read more…

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!

Read more…

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

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

Read more…

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!

Read more…

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.

Read more…

“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!!!

Read more…

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

Read more…