Your Baby Can Read - Anyone Trying This? *UPDATE*

A friend gave me the starter kit. We liked it just fine for a couple months. To maintain the child "reading" you have to do this everyday until the go to school. We did it for about 6 months I think. Might do it again b/c my son is about 18 months now. So it'd be a repeat for my daughter. Now that she is almost 4 she might retain more for longer. I just didn't want to watch it every day for the next several years. The kids get a lot more out of it if you watch it with them. It's just not that exciting if no parent is there too drawing them in.

Those commercials are so tempting aren't they? I won't let myself watch them anymore! I've come too close to calling a couple times!
My thinking is...we all learned to read...and will it really make that much difference if my daughter is reading at 2 or 3 or 5 or 6? There is so much structure to preschool, kindergarten, etc. these days...I want the first few years to be all about learning thru play.
So, I finally was able to turn the channel and say, "no thanks" and went and grabbed a few books, set my daughter on my lap and read read read to her...
I don't think there's any harm in the program...I just can't see spending so much $ for something my kiddo will learn anyway. Just my 2 cents!

I cannot say I have experience with the materials since my baby is 23 y/o. But, I can tell you that I would not use these materials for any baby.

I am a therapist, specializing in brain integration for specific learning difficulties and have studied a bit about early childhood development. In order for a child to read effectively, they not only need to be able to identify a word, they need to be able to phonetically sound out a word and they need to be able to identify the meaning of a word. Then they need to be able to connect those meanings together in combinations. The brain is not ready to accomplish all those functions simultaneously the first few years of life. In fact, it has been proven that children become better readers if they are not taught to read until the age of 7 or even 8, when all these brain functions are available to develop at the same time.

Many people think it is marvelous when a child appears to be reading well at an early age. However, few parents realize that many children can read a page aloud and sound quite proficient without comprehending the meanings or being able to recall what they have read.

If a child develops the skill of decoding words rapidly before they can develop the ability to assign meaning to those words, they are not likely to slow down the process of decoding when they are ready to learn to assign and organize the meanings of what they are decoding so that these two brain functions can work at the same pace. Getting these two functions to work at the same pace is necessary for efficient comprehension.

If we wait until it is easy for a child to learn to read, they often learn in 2 months what we normally spend 2 to 3 years trying to force or coerce them into learning. When they learn to read easily, they feel gratified and skilled and are far more likely to enjoy reading. So many children are badgered into reading early, giving the parents a false sense of pride about their child's accomplishments. In the process, the child often develops the feeling that they are not good students and that learning is hard work. That diminished sense of identity is very difficult to change once a child has accepted themselves as a 'poor student'. And all this is happening because the adults have set a goal of learning for the child that does not allow the child to learn at a natural developmental pace.

I also believe that there are other, far more fundamental skills that parents need to learn to teach children in these very early years so that they have the inner confidence to learn sciences, arts, and develop healthy social relationships later when the brain is ready. The book I constantly recommend for parents is The Family Virtues Guide, by Linda K. Popov.

Hi, J.,
I taught my baby to read by using "How to teach your baby to read" book by Glenn Doman (you can get this book cheaply at Amazon.com or borrow from the library). My daughter was reading the newspaper by age 4 (I had to grab the newspaper from her when she attempted to read "The Starr Report" LOL -- this was in 1998). You can also use Scholastic phonics books.

I once read that anyone who tried to teach a baby or young child to read would succeed -- it did not matter the method.

I enjoyed doing this.
Blessings,
P.

Hello,
I have been applying a similar material and it worked very well. It was astonising to see the interest of my child in the flashcards and it was more astonising indeed to see how it was able to read more and more words as the programe go on.
So, from my experience, the method works and you could choose any similar material to appply it.

I used the DVDs of www.babybit.com.
This DVDs are a bit expensives but they have a lot of flashcards packed inside. They are the cheapest if you think in terms of price per flashcard.

Please don't waste your money. It is just association. Children see letters as pictures so if you repetitively show them the same word written in the same way (font) and tell them what the word is the will associate those letters with that word. Change the font and they don't know what it says. It is a useful program for impressing other people with baby's tricks and it is cute but not for that amount. Try this, if your child watches many videos don't use the cases (with pictures) but I bet your child could tell you just by the writing on the disc or tape which movie it is. My boys did this and I thought it was really neat, I realized the associations and was intrigued. I hadn't given thought to how kids learn to read. This is basically the basis behind sight reading used in schools. Eventually the children will recognize the picture (word/letters) no matter what font is used. HTH

I was so happy that you've received so many responses! I saw this infomercial a while back and did some research on it. Most the people below mentioned what I discovered - it's based on recognition/whole language and not phonics-based. There are flash cards and videos and it's a lot of repetition. I finally decided to buy alphabet flashcards (from Walgreens) and teach letters and phonics myself. I show my daughter the picture and say "Apple . . . apple" then flip it over and show her the letter and say "A is for Apple." As she gets older, I'll have her trace the letter with her finger. This seems like a similar method and I'm teaching her letters and phonics instead of word recognition. (One of the issues with word recognition is children don't know how to decipher words that they haven't learned. With phonics, they learn to sound out the word and figure it out themselves.)

Someone posted about this several months ago and the reveiws for it weren't good then...I'd say if you are truly set on getting the program look at E-bay first...I've seen TONS of stuff go MUCH MUCH cheaper on ebay than what they are selling for on TV.

I agree with A. D. I made the mistake of buying a similar (but much cheaper) program online, and it wasn't what I thought it would be. Rather than actual reading, it was more like memorizing the "look" of certain words.

Shortly after starting it, we saw a bird show where a cockatiel picked the card the trainer named each time (out of four choices). It was eerily similiar to that reading program I'd bought... :-\ It made me feel like I was treating my child like a trained pet ("Look what Sage can do!") instead of letting him learn at his own pace, so we quit it immediately after that.

After that experience, I don't think it would be worth the money, even if it were free! ;-)

I finally had to ask myself, "why does my BABY need to read anyway?" It's not like they don't have enough to learn already--walking, talking, potty-training, etc., etc., etc. Reading really isn't necessary this young, and it's not real reading anyway, it's just a pretty little trick that seems impressive. "Early" doesn't always equal "better for the child," if you KWIM.

HTH! Good luck!
--A.

My mom bought my daughter this baby can read set. We just got done with the first disc and we are moving onto the second. It reminds me a lot of when I taught her baby sign language. She learned that when I said the word she would do the sign, then she started saying the word and I did the sign. This helped Briana's vocabulary a ton! She communicates better and learned to start talking earlier than her friends. With this "Your baby can read" Briana sees the word and knows that it goes with a motion or thing. For example, when she sees the word "smiling" she has memorized the sound and the letters that go with it. If she saw the word smiling next to smile, she thinks it is the same thing. So I don't believe this thing is teaching her to read, but to recongize letters that go with an object and sharpens her memory.

I don't know how much my mom paid for it, so I can't say if it is worth it or not. But the one thing that I have really wanted to do with Briana is not sit her down in front of the TV to watch cartoons. I want her doing educational things. That is why most of her toys are leapfrog instead of Barbie. We also do not do any of the leapfrog video games. She has the tag pen and books. I don't like video games. The tag pen makes her open a book and read with the help of a pen. The Your Baby can Read system does have flash cards that Briana likes better than the video because they are interactive. You pull out the side of the card to show the object or motion.

Sorry to write a book. I hope this helps! Good luck!

J.

I went to the web site to see how this curriculum works, and I can't find anything about phonics training. It all appears to be flashcards and things of that nature, which indicates memorization to me. Memorization is not learning to read. In order to become good readers, children must learn the individual sounds and be able to recognize them when they go from word to word in order to decode (read) new words. I'm trained in a curriculum called Alphabetic Phonics that teaches children with dyslexia how to read, and Your Baby Can Read appears to be based on the theory of Whole Language, which is that children learn to read as naturally as they learn to speak. THIS IS A FALSE PREMISE. It is true, though, that many of our schools are doing a lousy job of teaching reading.

If you read to your baby everyday and point things out to them when you go around the house they will learn a lot faster. I started teaching my son letters when he was 9 months old. We had a magna-doodle and would write one letter at a time on it and tell him what it was and he enjoyed erasing it and would come to us everyday with the magnadoodle and want us to write him letters. As you write the letter tell him what it is and what sound it makes. He was reading 3rd grade level by the time he was 4 years old. He knew all his letters and how to write most of them at age 2 and loved to do puzzles and was doing 100 piece puzzles at age 3. I did not buy expensive programs and had some learning toys but they didn't play with them that often. They learn a lot more from one on one with parents. I also started with simple books and read and pointed at the words as I read them. Books that have rhythm and rhyme help. The Dr Seuss early reader books are great for kids to learn to read because they repeat the words a lot and rhyme.

dont fall for it. It's too expensive $200+. All it is is flash cards and doing the motions with your baby...you can get flash card sets from Walgreens for $2 and watch sesame street to sign along with the songs for the interaction part. I keep seeing the infomertial too and almost want to get it. I may just tivo the infomertial next time and use that as my free version. lol.

I purchased these and my grand son who just turn two loves them. He ask for them. I have two new grand children and plan to put this to the test.