… and, finally, I started uploading the amazing collection of presentations by Isa:

• Ready Made Books: Colors in Nature. Wonderful bilingual presentations in English and German. Thanks to Isa!!(9/28/2009)
• Ready Made Books: Mi Dia Medio – My Half Day. With Sound. Really fun bilingual presentations in English and Spanish, read in both languages. Thanks to Isa!!(9/27/2009)
• Ready Made Books: Mi Dia Par – My Even Day. With Sound. Really fun bilingual presentations in English and Spanish, read in both languages. Thanks to Isa!!(9/27/2009)

How do you teach your kids colors? Shapes? Materials (wood vs plastic, metal vs glass)?

Thanks to Heidi for sharing her creative system for teaching colors or any other sets of things:

How about showing your kid sets of things that are exactly the same in except for the color?

When I was teaching my daughter to read words for the colors, I flipped the words over to show the color, I also used sets of things that were identical in every aspect except color. I.e. square blocks in 9 different colors, then at a different time plastic rings in 9 colors, then later on a set of colored pencils in 9 different colors, and so on. This worked well for my daughter, at 10 mths the only colors she had difficulty distinguishing between were bright pink and red!

Thanks to Isa, we’ll be having lots of new books in English, Spanish, German… or all of them at once! Meanwhile, I am still working on uploading my own files for everyone to enjoy:

• Ready Made Books: Spanish. Mi Casa 2. With sounds and illustrations.(9/25/2009)

Spanking – this is a highly debated issue. Some believe a good swap on the butt can’t do any damage. Some believe that the damage can be quite substantial.

The study is published in the September/October issue of Child Development is analyzing if the spanking one year olds can result in a more aggressive behavior as the children grow. The researches noticed that spanking is considered more appropriate in the low income families, then in high income, so 2,500 white, Mexican American and black children from low-income families were analyzed. The low income families have been chosen also because some behaviorists claim that if spanking is considered to be a cultural norm, it doesn’t have an effect on the level of aggression in a growing child.

Apparently, these behaviorists were proved wrong.

Read more…

New sets of single words in English!

• Teach Your Child to read… in English: Introductory Single Words – Foods 3 – Fruits . With illustrations & sounds. (9/23/2009)
• Teach Your Child to read… in English: Introductory Single Words – Possessions 3 – Art Tools . With illustrations & sounds. (9/23/2009)

I really like the definition of “pushiness” vs. “encouragement” in Mary Sheedy Kurcinka “How to raise a spirited child”: pushiness makes us feel bad and manipulated, while encouragement makes us feel good about ourselves and empowered. I do believe that a parent who is sensitive to the feelings and needs of his kid, can find the golden middle and often knows better then a kid.

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.

This collection of presentations is another terrific idea by A.P.P.: every single one of these books explores the words in “Charlotee’s web”. It’s great to be able to explain in detail to the little ones, what words “cellar”, “keen”, “humble” actually mean! All presentations are wonderfully worded and illustrated. So, I find them useful even without reference to the book where the words originated – I look at it as a wonderful small “picture dictionary”.

• Teach Your Baby to Read in English – Books. Charlotte’s Web Words 12-22. Thanks to A.P.P.!!! (8/30/2009)

My son has a great progress with English reading. Books from A.P.P. and Isa help us tremendously, and so do our own words/couplets/sentences presentations. Now our technique is definitely not Doman – we watch and read slides together. We take turns reading slides. We play games. We break the words down phonetically – for some reason my son really enjoys this process, and I am happy to adjust any system to fit his favorite learning style. The only Doman rule that I believe should be set in stone – is “do it joyously”! For the best results, I do believe that kids should enjoy the learning process.

• Teach Your Child to read… in English: Couplets 12: deserts & colors . With illustrations & sounds. (8/30/2009)