I do not like TV. We don’t have cable at home, we barely watch any DVDs. I especialy dislike DVDs for babies, like Baby Einsteins, and other similar pseudo-educational ones. Nevertheless, I am curious! Your Baby Can Read DVD by Dr. Titzer – seems to be the most popular among the parents who want to involve multimedia for teaching to read. I know that A.P.P. used it for his son, as well as many members of TeachYourBabyToRead Yahoo group and even of ChildAndMe! So, when my friend’s kids outgrew the video portion of the TeachYourBabyToRead package and she offered me to take over the DVDs, I couldn’t wait to try it out.

I’ve got to admit that I was smitten with great quality, professionalism, and sheer beauty of images, cards, books, scenes. I absolutely loved this series. Not to the point of showing it to my baby on daily basis, as they recommend – I am still not such a great fan of TV (see Can TV or computer be harmful or helpful for kids development?), but as a fun addition to our learning process when I really DO NEED a distraction (for us – it is only in a car – my little one hates being confined and in our area and life-style, driving is an unavoidable necessity).

It consists of three DVDs that we can show to the kids and a review. Every word appears on a screen with a pause, letting the kids try it themselves. Then it is read by a native speaker (kid or a adult), with a cursor running under the word to emphasize it. Then, the image follows… But that’s not it! It contains a lot more educational information! For the word “elephant” it shows Asian and African elephants. It talks about tigers. It explains what kids are doing on the screen. It shows written words as the kids are singing the song! It encourages the kids to participate!!

While we have only the DVDs, I really liked the rest of the materials as well. The sliding cards, card games, books with flaps – all very well made, all very pleasant to hold, all looking quite sturdy to handle.

I found just one down side: the price. These sets are very expensive: ~$200 for the whole set – DVDs, books, cards. You get a lot, but the price tag still looks quite unfriendly. However, I’ve seen these DVDs available in Blockbuster.com for rent! They appear to be quite popular: it indicates that there is a long waiting period for them, so I don’t know how useful that would turn out to be.

In all honesty, despite all my prejudice towards TV for babies, IF you absolutely NEED your baby to sit in front of a TV and looking for a DVD that might actually be good for their development, I’d check this one out. They have a trial offer – they send you the materials to review for ~$15 and if you don’t like it, you can return the whole package. You can find more details here: Your Baby Can Read Official Site.

You can find other parent recommendations here:
Teach Your Child with Multimedia: educational dvds, toys, websites, etc.