



Introduction: why this essay Can we teach our babies to read? Yes. Should we? Probably. In this essay, I’m going to try to convince parents that it is possible, and may be beneficial, to teach their children to read even while they are babies or toddlers. I also have remarks for researchers throughout. First, I will explain how I taught my own little one, beginning at age 22 months, and introduce some of our methods. Then I will answer various general objections to the notion and practice of teaching tiny tots to read. You might have heard of “baby reading” from the infomercials for Your Baby Can Read (YBCR), or maybe an acquaintance bragged about her 3-year-old reading, or you saw some amazing videos on YouTube. But I’m going to write this as if you had never even contemplated the idea of teaching such a young child how to read. The suggestion does sound admittedly bizarre at first. You would probably be justified to dismiss it without a second thought, if it were not for stories like my little boy’s. At 18 months old he knew most of the alphabet; a few months later, I decided to start teaching him to read, using certain methods; by 2½ years old, he was reading at the first grade level; at 3 years 4 months, he was reading (or at least decoding) at the fourth grade level; and shortly before his fourth birthday, he sounded out the First Amendment of the Constitution. As evidence of this progress I submit this video. As I first publish this, in December 2010, he is 4.5 and capable of decoding (not comprehending) some of my old philosophy books from college. By now, many people have heard of YBCR. Fewer know that there has a been small movement to teach babies to read, since Glenn Doman published the first edition of How to Teach Your Baby to Read in 1964. Doman has made a lot of claims—either inspiring or extravagant, depending on your point of view—about the potential of children. Regardless of the rhetoric, I’m convinced that thousands of children have been taught to read at surprisingly early ages by following his and similar methods. More recently, Robert Titzer discovered after making some videos for his baby daughter that she was able to recognize the words from the video even at the age of nine months. Based on these videos he created YBCR, which again appear to have helped very many tiny tykes to learn to read. Whether they actually have done so is something I will discuss below in detail. But why write a long essay on this topic? I have three reasons. The first is that the phenomenon needs to be discussed in a way understandable to the public. I want to share what I’ve learned with parents. With the YBCR phenomenon, and especially with all the YouTube videos of small children reading, I gather that there is a lively and growing interest in the whole notion of teaching very young children to read. But there is not very much objective information out there about the topic. You can find blogs, articles (this set of pages from BrillKids.com is excellent), and videos by people who are in business to sell baby-reading materials, and other comments from parents and child development students who are skeptical and disapproving of this movement. You can also find some quite critical essays online and book discussions from scholars in the fields of child development, psychology, and education. (See the Bibliography.) What is largely lacking, on both sides, is hard-nosed science or even very careful analysis. I will try to remedy these deficits by offering a very detailed case study and some in-depth discussion. I decided post this essay for free online. I’ve done this sort of thing before, and it’s one of the great things about the Internet: people just like to share their knowledge, especially when they perceive a need. I like the idea that I might help other people by what I write, and also that I might spark a deeper, better-informed discussion of the issues. The second reason is to intrigue psychologists, reading specialists, and other relevant experts with my own case study and with facts and arguments that they may have not considered. I would be delighted if this paper inspired some serious research into the issues raised here. The third reason for the essay is to announce that, and explain why, I and the group of people behind WatchKnow.org are helping to arrange one of the first careful studies of the phenomenon of very early reading, and that I am, as of this writing, in the design stages of a large set of free multimedia reading tutors for very young children. A little about me and my background. I work from home and spend much of my free time helping to educate my first son, who is now 4½ years old. Don’t get me wrong, please—he spends most of his day playing. But at mealtimes, bedtime, and occasionally at other times, I teach him stuff. I have a Ph.D. in philosophy and a long-standing interest in educational theory, but no formal training in education and only a little in psychology. I co‑founded Wikipedia and went on to get Citizendium.org and then WatchKnow.org started—all non-profit, educational sites. I am not selling any products and have no other business relationships or financial incentives to teach toddlers to read, nor do I push just one method, such as Doman’s or Titzer’s. Actually, I’ll be explaining in most depth the method I’ve developed and used with my own little boy, which is based on phonics. But please do not get the idea that I am pushing this method, either; I am offering it only as a data point for you to consider. I actually used a combination of methods to teach my boy to read. First, I thoroughly acquainted him with the alphabet and got him used to the idea of sounding out words with refrigerator magnets. Next, I started showing him flashcards (words plus pictures) arranged into increasingly difficult phonetic groupings, in a systematic order. About the same time, we started watching Your Baby Can Read—I am glad that I was able to put aside my misgivings about the off-putting hype surrounding YBCR and Doman’s method. Both before and after the most intensive “teaching” period, when he was two, I read huge amounts to him, which he liked. After I started teaching him to read, I made a point of always running my finger under the text as I read to him. That sums up our method, but I’ll explain much more in Part 1. I freely acknowledge that I am not an expert on “baby reading” (few experts on that specific topic exist). But I’ve thought and read a lot about it, and I think I understand the basics of the phenomenon well enough to write this essay. Besides, I’m mostly just reporting on our experience in the first part, and I will tell you when I am on thin ice, and when I’m disagreeing with the experts, in the second part. Indeed, you should be forewarned that the views I express, and perhaps some of the educational activities we’ve done, are contrary to the conventional wisdom of the child psychologists and educationists. If you expect a mere summary of expert opinion, you might as well stop here, because I don’t defer to the experts nearly as much as any “sensible” person would. (People familiar with my reputation vis-à-vis Wikipedia and Citizendium might find this surprising.) But I do follow the evidence to the best of my ability, and when I see evidence that does not jibe with conventional wisdom, I do not simply throw out the evidence. By the way, I should note that it is perfectly consistent with much of expert opinion to foster the literacy of children from a very early age. I am agreeing with the experts when I recommend reading a lot to babies, using and explaining about many words, and in other ways fostering a language-rich environment. It is not even unheard-of to try to foster early reading, as J. Richard Gentry recommends in Raising Confident Readers: How to Teach Your Child to Read and Write—from Baby to Age 7. Similarly, one prominent Australian reading expert, Trevor Cairney, is both a critic of YBCR but also enthusiastic in his encouragement of parents to foster the natural development of literacy from an early age, even if this naturally leads to early reading. What many expert critics seem to oppose are intentional attempts to teach babies to read through the use of videos and flash cards that are specially designed to teach them to read. Anyway, if you find any factual errors in this essay (I’m sure someone will be able to), let me know at sanger@watchknow.org, and I will post corrections. I’ve worked on this essay for over two years, off and on, and had feedback from many people. If you just want to argue with me, please don’t mail your comments just to me; post something on your blog, or on my blog, or post your comments on the Yahoo group TeachYourBabyToRead or the BrillKids forum, and send me a link to it. If you send an email, I can’t promise I will respond, because I’m pretty busy, and I would feel bad about not answering you. But on the other hand I’m very interested in this stuff these days, so maybe I will. One last thing. Whatever I may sound like in this essay—which, I hope, is properly skeptical and thoughtful—I want to assure you that I do not believe I have all the answers. This is not meant to be a complete method, much less a general position statement about all topics in early learning. It is an essay, which means a try, one that will be very much open to revision as I learn more myself. Acknowledgments I sought feedback from people with a wide variety of views and training, including mothers with early readers, school teachers, educational product designers, and experts in psychology and other fields. While some of these people support very early reading, others disagree with me. None are responsible for my errors. Thanks for helpful correspondence, or for commenting substantially on drafts: Charles Boone, Julia Brown, Trevor Cairney, Mary Alice Deveny, Alenka Elly Drel, Al Drumm, Richard Gentry, Jane M. Healy, Nikki Hockaday, Teresa Hopson, Gerelee Howard, Timothy D. Kailing, Mona McNee, Laura Rutherford, Robert Titzer, Maryanne Wolf, and K. L. Wong. Thanks very much to Charles Boone, WatchKnow, and the Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi for their support of this project.





PART 1: How my little boy learned to read as a toddler In this first part of the essay, I will detail how I have taught my own son how to read, and say something about other educational activities that have supported his reading ability. My point is not to suggest that this is the only way to teach a young child to read. The point of this is to provide to the public and relevant research communities at least one detailed example of how a child was taught to read at a very early age. Frankly—and I seriously mean no disrespect when I say this—but I have seen all too much evidence that many reading experts simply are not familiar with what goes on when a very young child learns to read. I hope this will provide them with a detailed view into one case. I’ll be addressing the questions of how it is possible to teach young children to read, and why one might want to do so, in Part 2 and the conclusion.





1. Early literacy activities We have read virtually daily to our son since he was 3 or 6 months (I don’t remember exactly when we started). We typically read several books daily—fewer as the years have gone on, because the books grew longer. As a baby, he usually just sat there and took it all in. He loved sitting on my lap as I read a dozen board books to him. Before he was a year old he was turning the pages. We began with baby books and moved up, around 12 or 15 months, to short simple stories like Clifford the Big Red Dog and the simplest Dr. Seuss. We never stopped reading lots every day, at least an hour a day, and in the first few years often over two hours (but spread out throughout the day). Our first books included, importantly, many ABC books and ABC flash cards, which we read each many times. We especially liked the Dr. Seuss ABC book. This led to him learning his ABCs at an early age. But introducing the alphabet and other mechanics of written language was only part of the challenge. There was also vocabulary, or the concepts language conveys. Many of our first books were “baby concept” books, teaching things like types of animals, colors, textures, and so forth—the usual sort of “nonfiction” books one finds in a baby book section. We used quite a few Priddy Books and Usborne baby books, and we did a lot of other commercial flash cards as well (but we still had not learned about Glenn Doman). Exposure to concepts and vocabulary in books was surely more important though. From early on I figured that a baby could learn basic concepts quickly from repeated exposure to them in “baby concept” books (and of course through encounters in the physical world as well). I think I was right. Basically, whenever we read, I explicitly defined words I thought were unfamiliar, in the simplest possible terms (beginning, of course, by pointing to pictures as I said the name of the thing in the picture). I actively sought out books that introduced new areas of vocabulary that would expose him to as many different areas of knowledge as I could find, at his current level of comprehension. I am sure that this proactive and cumulative vocabulary building is one reason why he could (I believe) appreciate some quite advanced books at a very early age. But more about book-reading strategy below. When he was a year old or so we bought him the LeapFrog "Alphabet Bus" (there are many products that do the same thing). We noticed he was, by 18 months, pressing the buttons in interesting patterns, systematically exploring. At some point we thought to ask him, “Where’s the S?” and he would press the S. So we discovered he could identify all his letters by 18-20 months. (By the way, if I had known about it, we would have been using the free Starfall.com alphabet pages, which are wonderful.) I then started hunting around online for information about when kids start learning the alphabet. I was surprised to learn that it was not at all unheard-of for children to know their ABCs by the time they are 18 months. (Age 3-5 is closer to the norm; but obviously it depends on whether you expose your child a lot to ABC books and the like.) Then I asked myself: if children can learn the alphabet at such an early age, then considering that alphabet learning is a key element in “reading readiness,” is it actually possible for them to read at such an early age? That sounded very unlikely to me, but that didn’t stop me from looking online for information. I discovered through searching on YouTube that some kids were, apparently, taught to read as babies. This was hard for me to believe, but I was pretty impressed by the videos that purported to be of babies reading. (This was around January 2008.) After hours of exploration there and elsewhere online, it was hard to deny that something was going on. I wasn’t sure what was happening and whether early reading was a good idea, even if it was possible. Even after I decided to give it a try, for a long time I was a skeptic, even despite the accumulating personal evidence. Nearly three years on, I now have many fewer doubts, but I still try to take a properly open and critical approach to the subject. Shortly after first seeing those YouTube videos, I decided to tell him that the big, bold word “GO” on the cover of one of his favorite books was read “guh-oh, go.” He loved the book in question and started enthusiastically saying "Go!" whenever he saw the book title. So we began with a single word, "go," which was really easy to understand and extremely high-interest (he already loved cars and trucks). I don’t remember this specifically, but I believe that tiny success is what got me thinking that we should try refrigerator magnets. So, when he was around 20 months old or so, to see what else he might be capable of, we got him a couple sets of refrigerator magnets. We played with these. I would show him, for example, B, A, T, and then I would say the letter sounds and have him repeat them. Then I would put them together slowly, then a little faster, and finally blended together in a whole word. I would encourage him to repeat after me at different stages, but mostly it was me explaining things to him. We stopped immediately if he lost interest. After some time, he actually spelled out and sounded out “dog,” in imitation of me. That convinced me that he might be capable of learning to read, as those children I saw on YouTube doing, so I decided to take the next steps. 2. An eclectic method of teaching a small child to read: summary Listening to an enormous number of books and doing various other pre-literacy activities was essential preparation for my son to learn to read. When I started to teach him to read at age 22 months, we did three things at once: videos, reading flashcards, and reading books with the finger-under-the-words trick. I’ll explain each of these briefly in this summary section, and then elaborate in later sections. First, the videos. When he was about 22 months, we got the first YBCR video. My boy absolutely loved it, so then we got the full set. He demanded to see the videos as often as possible (but we almost never showed a video more than once a day, and my wife slowed it down to every other day). Still, he got through the set of five in about two months and knew all of the words cold, no problem. Then he was bored with them. From online conversations I got the impression that the videos hook many little kids who try them. The videos may look amateurish to you, but remember that kids might just love what you find incredibly boring. The songs are nice, but it’s not just that. I think the arrow moving under a word as it is being read excites kids. It shows them that all these puzzling squiggles they see around them, which Mommy and Daddy take so much interest in, actually match up with words they hear spoken. Also, the words themselves are chosen to be accessible and interesting to babies. After the word, a short video clip is demonstrates the meaning of the word, which is also very welcome to babies, I think. So the production not only teaches children how to read certain words, it clarifies the meanings of the words. I think the reason my son and many other children are excited by these videos is that they essentially make sense of their linguistic world—all the written language around them—in a way they’ve never or rarely experienced before. The videos connect together print and spoken language, and explain very clearly and entertainingly some of the basic concepts they have been learning. Anyway, whatever the reason, my little boy loved them and soon learned all the words in all the videos (a few hundred, I think). Starting around the same time, maybe a week or two later, I started making flashcards. At the time, I didn’t know about Glenn Doman except, maybe, from a few articles about his methods online. Doman arranges flash cards by subject. But I figured that if we were going to do flash cards, I might as well arrange them phonetically, as this would be most likely to teach him the rules of phonics. I found some suitable-looking word lists in the back of Rudolf Flesch’s Why Johnny Can't Read. (I had no better reason for choosing this volume than it was what I had on hand; I couldn’t find any comparable lists online.) It was fairly easy to make the cards. On one side of the cards, which are about 2" by 4", I put the word in large print, and on the other side, a picture representing the word. I printed four cards per 8.5 x 11 page. After about six months, we had gone through hundreds of words and over half of Flesch’s phonetic rules. My boy gradually learned to read (sound out) many hundreds of words. I was careful to pick words, from Flesch’s word lists, that I knew he understood when spoken, or that I could explain. I did explain quite a few, so it became a great vocabulary lesson too—his vocabulary increased by leaps and bounds, as he used words that were on cards. I ended up making over 1,000 cards, and in the end he was reading thousands than that, even before we finished using cards, about a year later or so. (I have more details about this flashcard method below.) We were, of course, continuing to read a lot to him. Shortly after starting the flashcards and videos, I started moving my finger under the text of books as I read them. I am convinced that this made a huge difference. He seemed to be very interested in the text that was next to my finger, and was evidently following along much of the time—I sometimes looked at his eyes and I could see that he was usually following along closely (still does, at age four). Another reason I know that he was following along is that I occasionally misread a word, and he corrected me—even when he was two years old. In fact, when I intentionally misread a word, he almost always caught it and corrected me. (As he got older, he became much faster and more impatient when correcting me; he’s become very exacting, even about pronunciation, and always wants to look up unusual words in a dictionary app with audio pronunciations.) There is actually a book, Native Reading by Timothy D. Kailing, which advocates teaching children to read with the finger-under-the-text technique. It was Robert Titzer who stressed this both in his materials and privately to me. I now know that it’s an old trick. I am virtually certain that my own boy has advanced his reading ability far beyond the videos and flashcard words by following along with me in the text. I think it helps, also, that we steadily increase the reading level of books, especially nighttime stories. We read all sorts of things at meals, but before bed we started reading chapter books; we started that regular, often difficult, nighttime reading just before his third birthday. Among many others, by his fourth birthday, we read Stuart Little, The Trumpet of the Swan, Pinocchio, and Charlotte’s Web (all these in the original versions) as well as the first 30 “Magic Tree House” books. He has especially loved the “Magic Tree House” books—my hat is off to Mary Pope Osborne for creating a formula that so consistently results in books kids love to read and which teaches them so much. He loves some of the more advanced books, only in moderation, despite there being all sorts of words that I have to explain. He listens to my explanations patiently and with evident interest, and if I don’t explain a word he wants explained, he asks, or just looks at me expectantly (he has an “explain it” look). I believe these explanations are necessary in order for him to be willing to listen to such books. There were a couple of early literacy websites that we used a lot as well: Starfall.com and Literactive.com. I highly recommend both. They both have many interactive, multimedia stories and poems that allow the student to click on word to hear their pronunciation. This emboldened my own little boy to read these stories to me, the way that other little readers might read the little Bob Books (which I don’t have but have seen recommended). I found it strange that, while he wouldn’t want to read a Dr. Seuss book that was well within his ability, he would willingly read a Starfall or Literactive story that was no easier. I think it was strictly the difference in medium and our habits of using them; I always refused to read Starfall or Literactive to him, and he was in the habit of reading them to me, so he didn’t object. Both of these websites are very nicely leveled, too. (They have inspired me to design and, I hope, produce an even bigger educational site like them, an online multimedia encyclopedia for small children. This is currently just in the planning stages, so don’t get too excited yet.) Other tools we’ve used with good effect are the LeapFrog refrigerator phonics (the 3-letter kind), and a similar 4-letter LeapFrog device you can plug into the TV and play some software with. I feel that the LeapFrog “Tag” system would have been helpful in the early months of learning to read, but we purchased it after he was well on his way, so it didn’t get much use. I think these methods and tools have together created good results. As I first draft this section, in December 2009, he is three years, seven months old and, based on tests I’ve found online, is decoding text (not to say reading) at about the fourth grade level. It has been about 21 months since he started reading his first words on the refrigerator. Very gradually over this time, he has taken to reading books on his own, although for the most part he just flips through and reads pages at random. Occasionally he’ll get out a book and read it to his mother, although he doesn’t like to read to me too much. In all honesty, I must admit that he seems to feel “on the spot” when he reads to me. Mostly he reads silently to himself. We have often looked at his eyes as he is looking at the pages, and they are making saccades across the page and from top to bottom. He goes in phases in which he is reading all day long and books are covering the floor around the bookcases, and other times when he only pulls out a few, and focuses on his toys (especially Legos) or whatever. That is not something we try to control at all, although I have noticed that when we take down his Lego drawers, he prefers the Legos to reading. We have an enormous collection of books at home (on his fourth birthday, we had four bookcases overflowing with children’s books). Obviously, it is a hobby of mine to read to him and teach him in other ways. I can’t think of a better, more gainful hobby, however, and I recommend it to all parents of little children. It’s also been a lot of fun. I honestly can't say for certain what was most effective in teaching him to read the way he reads now—whether it's all the book-reading, YBCR, the phonics flashcards, or even the websites like Starfall. But it did seem that after we introduced a new phonetic rule (i.e., started a new set of cards), he was reading better. So if I had to pick one, it would be the phonics flashcards. But this is not certain, because he’s made very steady progress, and he picked up a lot of words that he couldn’t sound out based on the rules I had “explicitly” introduced. So I think he’s learned a fair bit of phonics “implicitly,” as Titzer says in his materials, and YBCR certainly helped with that. I also think that following along with a lot of text, as I moved my finger under it, was extremely important, and quite simply being exposed to a lot of books surely expanded his reading ability as the other methods could not. Still, for the reason I gave, I think the phonics training with the cards has been the single most essential element of the program, in the sense that they best explain how he became a reader quickly. Basically, in the space of six months, he went from being a non-reader, to reading CVC (“dog”) words almost right away, to reading multisyllabic words, “silent e” words, etc. In another year he was decoding at the fourth grade level or so. Here is a table summing up the different things we did and the function I think they might have performed in our program: Program element Brief description Speculated role in the overall program Phonics flashcards Showed over 1,000 hand-made flashcards, word on front and picture on back; first sounded out word for child, then prompted child to state word, then gave card to child to look at word and picture. (1) By providing many examples of each of dozens of phonics rules, grouped together, the cards allowed my boy to infer English phonics rules in a systematic way. (2) The order of the cards provided an in-depth (but painless) acquaintance with the internal structure of words and spelling, demystifying “the whole word.” (3) As a bonus, the very careful, analytical attention to the sounds that make up words caused my boy’s enunciation to improve by leaps and bounds; improvement in this regard began almost immediately. Your Baby Can Read Watched the Your Baby Can Read videos once a day at first, then less, over a period of about three months, beginning at age 22 months. (1) Gave my boy immediate and early sense of comprehension and mastery over a small amount of material, increasing his motivation to learn. (2) Effectively ingrained the difficult but fundamental concept of letter-sound connection. (3) Provided an introduction to (but not systematic training in) phonics. Reading, pointing, and explaining Read copious amounts to child daily, from a wide variety of books and media, beginning well before 12 months of age; pointed at words while reading; explained the meanings of words in very simple terms. (1) Reading and explaining words and concepts greatly helped to increase my boy’s vocabulary and conceptual storehouse. This is crucial to reading in the full-blooded sense. (2) Pointing at words while reading functioned as an enormous amount of reading practice; the more words he both saw and heard at the same time, the more he understood written language. (3) Beyond just vocabulary, copious reading also familiarizes a child with grammar and pronunciation and other elements of language. Phonics flashcards and YBCR without reading would have meant a much smaller vocabulary and fluency (because reading supplies practice); phonics flashcards and reading might well have worked, but YBCR certainly provided an excellent start; and doing just YBCR and reading might have run the risk of inadequate exposure to phonics, with all the well-known problems that entails. The result was a balanced, diverse program in which I deliberately sought both to teach and support the learning of reading, with language found throughout the day, as part of the “environment” —which as it happens modeled some of the solid recommendations of Kailing’s Native Reading as well as Doman or Titzer. 3. Phonics flashcard method I did not teach my boy to read only with flashcards (uploaded here, giant 122 MB zip archive of .doc files), but I do think that they helped quite a bit. Using the word lists from Flesch’s phonics primer, I believe these cards made it possible for my son to “crack the phonetic code” much faster than he would have otherwise. Soon after we started, my son did not have the problem, which some parents have complained of, of not being able to read words that have not been explicitly introduced. So I thought I would share the method with you. I have little reason to claim that it is more generally effective than any other, but we certainly seem to have had good luck with it, and this might give you an idea of what is possible. I understand that the Doman method has the parent introduce sets of words based on familiar subject matters, to keep the child’s interest highest. That seems reasonable on first glance, especially as a way to build vocabulary, but it is not the approach I took. I introduced words in sets based on simplest phonetic rule to most complex phonetic rule—that is how I would describe the word lists I used. So we began with the short vowels (the first set includes short-A word like mat, hat, Pam, Sam, and so forth), then moved on to -ck, then other two-consonant blends, and then on to more advanced phonics rules. I did not introduce words that I could not explain with the help of the picture on the back of the card, but on the other hand, I did not shy away from unfamiliar words if I thought I could explain them. As a result, with this program, his spoken vocabulary shot through the roof. He started talking a lot more, reproducing his new words, and with markedly better diction. Surely his speaking ability would have blossomed during that period without such training, because the training began after age 22 months, but I suspect his vocabulary wouldn’t have grown as quickly, because many of the words he used, he learned from my cards (not surprising, given that there are over 1,000 words on those cards, all together). This is just my unscientific impression, but I believe his learning how to read words phonetically has made a much more prolific and precise speaker out of him. It is worth pointing out that the age at which I started phonics flashcards with him may have mattered quite a bit. The Doman and Titzer methods recommend starting to teach babies as young as, say, three or six months old. We could not have used my method at that age, because part of this method is to have the child say out loud the word that is written on the card. But since we started at 22 months, I could be sure that he knew the words. I could also be more confident that he understood the meanings of all the words I introduced. It was also a great age to start this training because he was not nearly as independent and willful as he would become, as a typical two- and three-year-old. Here is how I taught my boy using the cards. The first time through some cards (typically, I would show him 8 or 12 at a time), I showed the card and simply read the word on it, then sounded it out ("cat...kk..aah...tt...cat") while moving my finger underneath the word. Then I sounded it out a little faster, and a little faster still, then put the whole thing together. I would ask him to say the word, too, which he was almost always game to do. Then I turned over the card and gave it to my boy, and talked about the picture on the back. (For verbs and prepositions, and other words difficult to “depict,” I wrote a short sentence including the word, and put it under a picture illustrating the whole sentence.) Sometimes, if the word was new, I would try to explain the meaning of the word in as simple terms as possible. Words I felt I couldn't explain, I didn't use. Looking at the picture was his favorite part. Sometimes he would naughtily crumple the cards, which are just folded over strips of regular printer paper, but we let him do that—it doesn’t make the cards less useable. (And if I thought the crumpling was because he was frustrated or tired, as opposed to simple fascination with scraps of paper, we’d stop.) I was delighted that my boy generally liked the cards, and was pretty enthusiastic about them at times. Not all children may be this way, but other parents have reported a similar reception. Indeed, several of them have told me that my cards were what “did the trick” to move their children past word memorization to full-fledged reading. Anyway, obviously, kids are all different and of course I know that not all may take to this method. In the first month or two, the second time I showed him a set of cards, I would sound them out for him (“kk...aah...tt”) and ask him, “What’s that say?” Then he’d usually tell me, and only then I’d turn the card over. That worked pretty nicely. (This is one reason why my precise method could not be done at the age of six months.) After a few days of exposure, he was able to read the cards with no hints or prompting. We did not move onto a new set of cards until he had “mastered” the previous set of 8 or 12, i.e., he was reading all of the cards in a set without mistake or much of a pause (or me sounding them out at all). There were around 25 words per set, but, again, I did not present these all at the same time. That would have been too much—overkill. As Doman advised, to keep it fun, sessions should be kept short and frequent rather than long and infrequent. Some days my son liked to look at cards through a whole meal, or 20-30 minutes, but that was very rare; most sessions were 5 to 10 minutes, and often they were just a few minutes. In the first several weeks, he began using cards with some difficulty. He definitely had to go through a period where he was fully mastering the general concept that written words are matched to spoken words. Grasping this is a milestone that reading experts make much of. I tried to make it fun for him in whatever way I could. For example, on the back of “tell” there is a picture of two women gossiping, one whispering into another’s ear, and I added the caption, “Let me tell you.” Then I whispered in his ear and said, “Let me tell you!” and he got a huge kick out of that. Anyway, at first, he went through the cards very slowly. But going through a few sets, he started getting the game. If he ever had any trouble with a word, I would simply read it for him. The aim was always to keep it low-pressure. Sometimes I asked him sound out the words himself, but he wasn't as interested in this, so I ask that too much. He would usually just read the word right away, or else wait for me to sound it out, and then say it himself. Whether sounding it out himself silently, out loud, or having me do it, he evidently got the idea. At one point in the first month, we had an exchange that went like this: "What's this?" [I point at the word "cat".] "Cup." "Nope, look at it." "kuh...aah...tuh...cat!" "Good boy!" After a month, he had totally glommed onto the idea. So then I started out new sets of cards (and so new rules) by encouraging him to sound out the words himself. Of course, I always gave him the rule, e.g., saying “ ‘qu’ sounds like <sound>” and helping him out, then praising correct answers. He got to the point where, the first time he saw a word, he needed only a little help from me sounding out the word. Once one of us (or me sounding out the first bit, and him finishing it) had sounded out the word, he immediately said it naturally, no problem. I’ve noticed that some beginning readers read by slowly and carefully sounding out words. This is great, and it is surely a step toward fluent reading, but it is not itself fluent. One mother online complained about this “problem” and asked me how she can get her child to read more quickly. I told her that I didn’t really know, but I think the reason we never had this problem is that I usually did the sounding-out. If you always or usually ask the child to do it, he or she is learning to do that and might then do it dutifully. But if you usually do the sounding-out, I hypothesize that the child’s mind will, like a sponge, absorb the letter-sound connections and internalize the sounding-out. If you let the child “tell the punchline” (put the sounds together), then the child is practicing reading the word quickly. Obviously I don’t know, but I speculate that that is what happened with my son. I want to stop here to underscore that I taught him to say “that’s enough.” If he said “that’s enough” when we were doing cards, which he did sometimes, then we would stop instantly and not do any more that day. If he seemed reluctant for a few days in a row, we’d take break for a week or so. If we then came back to cards and he still wasn’t interested, we'd take another break for a few weeks—even a month, once or twice. Then we’d come back to them and he’d be all interested again. In fact, he was usually quite comfortable with the cards, and regularly asked for “new cahds.” I can’t expect it would work that way with everyone, but it worked that way for us. This gentle approach was inspired as much by Glenn Doman as anyone. Quite contrary to the “pressuring parents” stereotype, Doman emphasizes the importance of “keeping it fun” for children, and never forcing or testing them, and that stuck with me. Whatever you might say about Doman’s methods, this point is (I think) broadly speaking correct and deeply important. After a couple months—after doing ten of the word lists, or so—I don’t think I sounded out the words much at all after the first time through a set. I would sound out the words the first time and after that he'd be able to figure it out himself, i.e., he would say it. Sometimes he would stare at a word without saying anything for a while, then he'd just come out with it. I’m pretty sure he was sounding it out in his head. By age 3½ he was usually reading silently—and very fast, as far as I could tell. I watched him reading books, and I looked at his eyes moving very quickly over the page. After one longer break from doing cards, a few months after we started, we decided to review all the cards we had done before. I think this particular review really helped a lot, because he read much more confidently after that and for several months afterward we occasionally went back to old cards to review. It seems obvious that such reviews could have helped refresh and solidify his knowledge. Beginning several months after starting, I also started asking him to read whole sentences, then short pages, and then whole (very easy) books. I always made sure that he knew all the words. So he got more practice that way, and I of course helped him and did not insist or push. He was never eager to do this except in small doses. About six months after he had started, he made another major advance. He started sight-reading many of the new cards, on the first try, even for rules he hadn't been introduced to before. If he couldn’t get a word, I started sounding it out for him, then he would finish after I slowly sounded out one or two letters. At this point he could decode well over 1,000 words, probably more like 5,000. By the time we were to word lists #20 to #30 or so (over halfway through), I almost never had to sound out words in advance, he was simply reading brand new words, illustrating brand new phonetic principles, without me saying or helping much at all. I would just explain the new rule, maybe just giving an example or two—and maybe even this wasn’t necessary—and then he would just read the new words perfectly the first time. But we kept doing the cards anyway, to solidify his phonetic understanding. I was glad we did that solidifying work, by the way; I think it helped. As his decoding skills improved, his interest in the cards waned, and we gradually tapered off using them. The last time I was regularly making new cards was a little over a year after we started. Since then I did make one set of cards, in the interest of completeness, but I felt rather silly doing it, because he knew the words perfectly well—it was pretty pointless. So that’s why I never finished going through all of Flesch’s word lists. I never made cards for the last 3-4 lists or so. If someone else wants to finish my work, I’ll be happy to upload it. There are some who might still be skeptical of my claims, and insist that my son was not learning phonics and was only memorizing individual words. After all, I did show and read to him over 1,000 cards. I have encountered such skepticism in several places (an example); the toddler brain is supposed to be incapable of learning phonics, so apparently we did the impossible. In response, I want to emphasize that while he often recognized words immediately, without sounding them out, we saw all sorts of evidence that he was indeed sounding out words from the earliest months of his reading. His first words read were words that we spelled and sounded out together with refrigerator magnets. A few months later, we sometimes heard him explicitly sound out parts of words, but not usually entire words. I think he found that tedious. If I asked him to (I only rarely did), he might impatiently sound out an entire word, which he did pretty well. He sometimes read unfamiliar and not-perfectly-phonetic or more advanced-phonetic words incorrectly, according to the simpler phonetic rules he’d learned, which means he must have been sounding the words out silently. Since those early months, his advanced reading ability, and occasional phonetic rule-following miscues (which go on to this day—as a 4-year-old he quickly misread the name “Thomson” with a θ sound), makes it even more obvious that he has “cracked the code” of phonics. Frankly, the whole process was pretty painless, and I recommend it. But I realize, and you should know, that I am not a reading expert. I hope the above account makes it more plausible, if you’ve had doubts, that it is possible to teach small children phonics. If your child is old enough (obviously, my particular method can’t be used with kids whose mouths/voices can’t make the sounds) and you don’t have any philosophical objections, try it and see if you have similar luck. Of course, your mileage may vary. I’m always gratified to hear from those who have used my cards and had an experience similar to ours. My wife, who patiently witnessed the whole process, was totally convinced that it was my cards, more than Your Baby Can Read or anything else, that taught our son to decode written language. 4. Your Baby Can Read Note: I do not have any financial stake in the companies that sell Your Baby Can Read. I’ve conversed with Dr. Titzer but as a highly interested and curious customer, and later, to help organize an independent study of the efficacy of the videos. He also commented on this essay before I posted it. I do not maintain that one must spend $200 on videos to teach a small child to learn to read. If you can’t handle the expense, there are other ways to do it. You might be able to find copies at the library. Also, there are other DVD and software programs that purport to do something similar, such as the Brillkids.com “Little Reader” (which I’ve used—it’s a good software implementation of the Doman method), and the Monki See Monki Do and Tweedlewink programs (which I haven’t seen yet, but which are widely touted by the interested community). Finally, there is the Doman method itself, which can require a lot of work out of the parent, but which is free. Some parents use PowerPoint presentations to achieve a similar effect to Doman’s “bits” cards, and quite a few of such PowerPoint presentations are available for free online, for example at BrillKids.com. At about the same time I started making cards (when my son was 22 months), we started watching the Your Baby Can Read videos. This is a series of five DVDs, marketed for the use of children through age five, with accompanying media like some very nice flashcards and books. We bought the first DVD and my son absolutely loved it. Then we got the others, and he went through them all in about three months or so. For the first few months he was desperate to watch them as much as possible. Just before his second birthday, he was constantly saying “read!” and later on “your baby can read!” The videos basically consist of printed words in very large font size, spoken while an arrow moves under the word, followed by a moving picture of the thing that it is a word of, displayed while a spoken sentence or two using the word describes what’s happening in the video. For a few minutes at the end of the videos, there is some attempt to teach some words in an order that better conduces to phonetic understanding. But I’m convinced these videos helped him to learn to the basics of word decoding. After about two months, we had gone through the whole set of DVDs, and after four months, he could almost instantly read all the words on all the accompanying cards (very similar to the cards I make for him, and also similar to Doman flashcards). For us, these videos work as billed. My son was able, with written words alone as a cue, to recognize and repeat the words out loud. I was very interested in the fact that, in the first few months, he was able to read the YBCR words much more quickly, and with less difficulty, than the words I was teaching more systematically with my phonics flashcards, even though the words on my cards were often much simpler (“dog” and “kick” versus “elephant” and “hippopotamus”). But this advantage dropped away after six months or so, and after that he was able to read unfamiliar words on new cards very quickly as well. For a while I thought that the DVDs were only teaching the words on the DVDs, and did not really help my son to learn anything else about reading. But I later came to the opinion, which I am still not absolutely sure about, that they did help him to learn some phonics patterns. This is a claim that Titzer himself makes, and which Doman has made as well on behalf of his own program. They both say that a child basically gets experience through multiple examples of phonetic rules, and then naturally infers the rules by induction. That this should be possible need not be too surprising, considering that this is a well-documented phenomenon for slightly older children (ages 3-5; see Durkin’s Children Who Read Early) and that babies naturally learn many other linguistic rules, such as how words are chunked (where one word ends and another begins) and the basic rules of grammar, inductively and without explicit instruction. In any case, I think the videos probably made my son much more comfortable with the whole notion of matching sounds to written marks. Learning to recognize long words like “hippopotamus” must also give a child some confidence, and that’s important. The above analysis is entirely speculation, but I have to doubt that the YBCR videos, by themselves and without follow-up in the form of much reading (at the very least), would give most children the ability to read. Studies soon to appear may show something different, and Titzer privately expressed thoughtful disagreement with me on this. Among other things, he wrote me, “We have thousands of parents who have written to say that their babies and toddlers learned to read from using YBCR. Only a few of these parents ever mention that they did additional reading activities.” But surely, any parent who is motivated to show YBCR is probably also going to be motivated to do a fair bit of reading as well, and possibly some other language-building activities. Of course they should, anyway. In correspondence, Timothy Kailing (the advocate of pointing-while-reading) made an interesting, related point. I can’t say it any better than he did: While many children can learn phonetic rules implicitly from a whole word approach, I think, if clumsily taught, some children could indeed at least go through a stage where they are “barking” at words [reading without comprehension], as you called it. My main concern with videos and flashcards is that it could, for some children, encourage an idiogrammatic [whole symbol-based, not phonics-based] level of understanding that, while probably transitory and not harmful for most children, is certainly quite independent from the sort of understanding that leads to fluent reading. Using a small set of words or the same video over and over, in a highly stylized setting, increases my concern. Your emphasis on how you used a variety of reading material, methods, and various sorts of literate play are, to me, very important points. And in this context, I have no concerns with flashcards and videos as part of the mix. 5. Reading books As I said, about 3-4 months after we started teaching him to read, my son could and occasionally did read short, simple, phonics-based stories by himself. It was still amazing to me that, at age 26 months or so, he was able to read through, for example, the entire 20 or so pages of Blue Train, Green Train, a very simple Thomas the Tank Engine story (not an original one; we’ve read many of the originals from a fat anthology, too; highly recommended!). He had most of those first stories read to him many times in the past, so for many of them there was a question how much he had simply memorized the stories. But we also used the wonderful (and free) Starfall.com website and discovered that he could, with some help and prompting, get through some brand new stories from that site as well. I also noticed that he was more than capable of reading brand new whole sentences and long phrases that I wrote out, if he was familiar with the words. But within a few months he was also sounding out unfamiliar words, phonetically similar to old words. This demonstrates that, plainly, he was neither merely memorizing the sequence of words in the stories he read, nor merely recalling the shape of the words without decoding them. But the best reading practice he got from whole books did not take the form of him reading books to me, but the other way around. Maybe more than the phonics flashcards or YBCR, I attribute our success in getting our son to read at an extremely young age to the fact that in his first three years, we sat down and read with him daily, usually many toddler books per day. While the phonics flashcards taught him phonics rules, and YBCR completely ingrained the letter-sound connections and gave him the confidence that he could read some words, it was my regular reading to him that helped us to practice reading. That is, every time we read a book, he was practicing his own reading. How? After his 24th month or so, I made a point of putting my finger under the word I was reading, so he could follow along with the text if he wished. We still do this; it’s no trouble for me, and he still learns from it. This simple practice also reinforced the idea that everything I was saying could be found in those words on the page. I think this has reinforced already-learned words and perhaps even taught him some common words like “the.” I never had to teach him “sight words” or “Dolch words” using flashcards or any other explicit way. (Mind you, some supposed “sight words” turn out to be phonetic, if you review a full complement of phonics rules.) This is the trick touted by Kailing in Native Reading, and even appears in To Kill a Mockingbird, where Scout says: I could not remember when the lines above Atticus's moving finger separated into words, but I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory, listening to the news of the day, Bills To Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Dow—anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night. Here is another trick I used quite a bit. When I got to a simple phrase or sentence in a book, particularly one made of words that I knew he knew, I stopped and if necessary (it usually wasn’t) prompted him to finish, which he usually did without too much trouble. After he turned three or so, however, he caught on to my “trick” and would not finish reading sentences, unless I asked him to explicitly, which I then did only very infrequently. We have deliberately avoided many of the oversimplified “easy reader” books, unless we know that he likes a series, or it looks interesting. We don’t have the Dick-and-Jane books, or the many artificial-sounding books written specifically as part of phonics or basal reading programs. We tried a few, but he did not seem very interested. Most of such books are simply not very interesting to children, I believe, and asking children to read from those books make reading seem boring. I don’t mean to say that we didn’t use any beginner books, written specifically for their phonetic ease. The Starfall online books are this way, and they aren’t “great literature,” but my boy loved them probably because of the moving pictures and I think also the sound-out-the-word feature. So I’m not doctrinaire on this point; I go with whatever my boy seems to like. Still, rather than having him read only from the more boring, carefully-leveled phonics or basal readers, I much prefer my approach, which is to ask him (occasionally, not too much) to read those words, phrases, or sentences that he can read in a book that he already likes. There are several advantages to this. I think it gave him a sense of accomplishment, and let him understand that the words on the cards could be found in books he liked. Reading words familiar from my phonics flashcards in the context of a familiar, well-liked story no doubt helped improve overall facility. I also could see how, as we went through more and more phonetic rules, we could read more and more of the words in the books he already had. I suspect this was behind his requests for “new cards” and the interest he took in cards: the cards were the keys that unlocked his beloved books, perhaps. (I say this poetically, but there is a testable hypothesis here.) However the books were chosen, it seems extremely important that we combined the cards with large amounts of ongoing reading. The books without the cards would almost certainly not have taught him to read (however positive the experience would have been otherwise), and the cards without the books would have been absolutely hopeless, because otherwise he would not have the interest in and familiarity with all those words. When he was one and two years old, his favorite books included Curious George and Madeline. Our first chapter book was Winnie-the-Pooh which we read sometime when he was two. Then, just before his third birthday, we started reading chapter books more consistently. Stuart Little was one of the first—I was prepared to put it aside for a few years, and I was amazed that it held his attention. We also read Charlotte’s Web, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, the My Father’s Dragon series, and The Boxcar Children. Later on, we were sucked into the Magic Tree House books. Then we read Little House in the Big Woods, Charlotte’s Web again, Pinocchio twice in a row, and The Trumpet of the Swan twice. Though his reading and comprehension level are clearly advanced, we also still read quite a few picture and story books of various kinds. We have also read a tremendous amount of nonfiction. His favorite topics here have included trucks and other heavy machinery, animals (for a while, it was all “muddy pigs” all the time, inspired by Wilbur from Charlotte’s Web), electricity, and various other topics. But we have read books about virtually every general nonfiction subject accessible to his age. In addition to our own large and growing book collection, we made occasional trips to the library as well. I say all this not (or not merely) to brag, but to point out that you probably cannot expect results similar to those we got from just phonics flashcards or just YBCR without being immersed in language that is constantly broadening the child’s vocabulary, i.e., by a lot of reading. According to research I can’t put my hands on just now, written language has a far greater range of words than spoken language, and even the speech of well-educated people uses a surprisingly smaller range of words than fairly simple books. If you want your child to be able to read many words with good comprehension, he or she must be exposed to those words in the first place. As I’ll explain more further down, this is a point that many reading experts (Jane Healy would be just one example) hammer on: reading without comprehension is not really reading. I can’t disagree. I simply do not draw the conclusion that, therefore, children cannot or should not start learning to read until they have “naturally” absorbed more vocabulary. What if, as in our case, by age two a child has been exposed to many hundreds of books about many different topics? What if one takes other steps to improve their conceptual storehouse? Then understanding the typical toddler book is not much of a challenge. Just one caution, again from personal experience: mix some easy books in with the more difficult ones. It is a bad idea always to “push the envelope” in terms of the child’s reading level. Reading only above a child’s level can turn her off to books. Reading a mixture of books, some that are very easy, some not-too-hard-and-not-too-easy, and some relatively difficult is the best way to keep up a lively interest in reading, we found. Say your child is only moderately challenged when you read him Curious George. Probably, most of his reading should be at about that level. But he’ll probably still be entertained, comforted, and helped by reading much easier books like the Biscuit books. He will probably also appreciate some, but not a lot, of more advanced material such as Winnie-the-Pooh or the Magic Tree House series. We generally read the more advanced stuff at bedtime—I don’t know if that’s a good idea but that’s the habit we got into. Some mothers I’ve talked to online theorized that chapter books are easier to read at bedtime because children are more willing to read more difficult stuff in order to put off bedtime. We didn’t even start a regular bedtime story until we started seriously on chapter books, which wasn’t until just before his third birthday. I’ve occasionally come across parents who express frustration that their children don’t want to read to. It’s hard to say what the problem is without more specific information, but what could be causing it is a lack of book choices that are acceptable to the child. Just like adults, small children—especially after the age of 2 to 3—have definite tastes in books, and they can be in the mood for one book at one time and a different one at another. So it is important, crucial in fact, to have a good supply of unread (or under-read) books on hand at all times, so you can give your child a large range of choices. The way we usually do it is rather simple: I propose a book. If he’s game he’ll show interest in my choice. If not, I offer him a choice of 4-5 more books, and usually he’ll choose one of those. He usually wants to read something. You might worry that your child might never want to read certain expensive books you’ve bought or never want to study some topic you think is important for him to know about. Our experience, however, is that books he says “no” to at one time, he’ll usually say “yes” to at some later time. The percentage of books that I’ve bought or checked out for him that he always says “no” to is around 5-10%. (The percentage is higher for chapter books, but that doesn’t keep us from reading high-quality chapter books every evening; see the list at the end of this essay.) Unaccountably, there are some books that he’s decided he just doesn’t like. That’s OK with me. If you take this advice, in time your child will surely learn that there’s always something interesting out there to read. Here are some other tricks we’ve used. Reading time is, famously, closeness time, and this is important. Sit the child in your lap or right next to you in a comfy couch or chair, and there will be less resistance than if you are sitting in front of the child, librarian style. Also, read at mealtimes, when you have a “captive audience”; this is when we get a lot of our reading done. Finally, of course, don’t read in a monotone or with a sing-song voice, read like you mean it, conversationally or dramatically. Vary your voice; read like you understand and care what you are reading about. It also helps to read with the notion that you are not just sounding out the words, but conveying meaning; I think of myself as not so much reading as explaining the text to the child. The difficulty of vocabulary can turn a child off to more advanced books. But I was able to make otherwise difficult books accessible to my son. I pointed at any illustrative pictures whenever I thought he may not understand a word. Especially at age two and later, when vocabulary is starting to get off the ground floor, I offered very simple definitions of difficult words. Certainly, children can pick up a lot from context. But I am also sure, based on my experience of explaining hundreds of words to my boy and then watching him use those words immediately in conversation, that giving simple verbal glosses of words has greatly increased his vocabulary. At first you might find yourself fumbling for words of explanation, but the more child-accessible definitions you offer, the easier it becomes to formulate them “on the fly,” so you don’t have to stop reading for long. Sometimes just one or two words, a vague synonym, will help. By using such tricks, we were able to read Pinocchio (in this edition, chock-full of pictures), which has a lot of quite difficult vocabulary words. I explained a lot of those words on the fly, and my boy liked the story enough not to be impatient with the explanations. In fact, he came to expect such explanations and seemed to find them interesting, if they weren’t too long. As to the book itself, he liked it so much that we immediately went back to read it a second time, even though it’s quite long for a children’s book. (I think it appealed to the “naughty little boy” in him; see my review.) 6. Concept-building: presentations, the Doman method, and OPD About six months after I started teaching my son to read, I started showing him PowerPoint presentations that I made. Over the course of the next 18 months or so, I made around 150 presentations. I think this increased his general knowledge and vocabulary and also helped with his reading ability. But first, some background. After starting on phonics flashcards and YBCR, I started reading more on- and offline about Glenn Doman and his method. It was Doman’s notion of flashcards and other online presentations I had seen, that inspired the presentations I started about six months after we started learning to read. I am not going to go into much detail about Doman’s methods, because there are many explanations online, and an in-depth explanation would make this already too-long essay even longer. Beginning in the 1950s, Glenn Doman, originally trained as a physical therapist, turned to therapy for brain-damaged children. Later he applied his teaching therapies to normal children. He became convinced that every child has genius potential, and that society is dreadfully under-serving its children by not tapping into that potential. This led to a series of books with titles like How to Teach Your Baby to Read and How to Give Your Baby Encyclopedic Knowledge. The latter title spoke to my interests in encyclopedias and knowledge, so I read it shortly after I began teaching my son to read. I found Doman’s writing to be over-the-top and his claims exaggerated, but, considering the surprising examples of baby reading and other kinds of precocious development, I still found the Doman method intriguing. The method involves several stages of development. In the first stage, the teacher sits a baby down (beginning around six months of age) and flashes very large-type, red-colored words on large cards (one word filling up a whole card the size of a piece of notebook paper), one per second, while saying the word in a joyful tone of voice. It is crucial, says Doman, that this flashing should not be done unless a baby is fully engaged and alert. Many accounts I’ve read say that babies actually like this quite a bit. In a later stage (or maybe it is just an alternate way of doing the first stage), after the word, a large, clear picture of the thing the word describes is shown. So, for example, one might print the word “dog” in very big red letters on a large piece of card paper, and then paste a picture of a dog (just the dog, nothing else) on another card. One prepares 5-10 of such word-picture pairs, and then shows them in quick succession to the baby. This “flashing” is supposed to be done something like three times a day, and can be accomplished in less than a minute, total. The next stage involves not just saying the word, but expressing some pithy facts about the object named. So you might first show and state the word “dog,” and then, while showing a picture or two of dogs, you might say, “Dogs bark to scare off people and animals they don’t know, or when excited.” Doman recommended making paper flashcards, but for the 21st century, his method has been converted into a digital form by various active parents, such as Perla Adams at theclassicalmommy.com (Adams later became disillusioned with the Doman method because of its emphasis on the whole word method; you can read her insights on her site) and the people at BrillKids.com, in PowerPoint presentations and other media. BrillKids has proprietary software. Some people make videos that can be used a similar way, and apps are the latest way to deliver such content. Good images can be found very quickly via Google Image Search, Flickr, and other sources, and then simply dragged on to PowerPoint slides. I proceeded to download dozens of PowerPoint presentations made by parents who were following Doman’s methods; my son ate these up. I soon started making many presentations myself, about a wide assortment of topics—not just the ones recommended by Doman. I decided to put whole sentences (or parts of sentences) on most presentations, and finding an appropriate image for each “fact” I wanted to teach. (But I never used too much text, and always tried to use words that I thought my son would know.) In this way, we covered topics as diverse as zoo animals, geography, art, music, space, physical science, and many other topics. For the same purpose, we also spent a fair bit of time in the library when he was two years old, looking for what librarians call “concept books.” A concept book is basically a very simply-written book meant to introduce some basic concept, like the numbers, alphabet, seasons, colors, and other of the simplest concepts. My own presentations were essentially concept books put onto PowerPoint presentations. I still make presentations occasionally. My son was always game to look at new presentations, and especially when he was two, he would look at the presentations over and over again. But later on, there were some he didn’t seem to like so much; I didn’t insist on showing them, of course. Over the course of several months, anyway, we looked even at the less attractive ones several times, and he showed every sign of picking up a lot of knowledge that way. Sometimes he would complain and cry loudly if we stopped looking at them before he was ready to stop, and he had his favorites that he insisted on looking at over and over and over—just as with ordinary books. You might quite justifiably wonder what the point of preparing amateur presentations of this sort is, when the same information is to be found, more professionally produced, in children’s books. To be sure, we did read both books and presentations a lot, though we spent much more time on regular books than on presentations. But presentations of the sort I make are similar to Doman-style presentations in that they serve two functions that ordinary books do not serve so well. The first is that they can help to teach a small child to read. By using large print that pops out at the child (Doman recommends using bold red type), by using just one or few words per page, and by clearly separating text from pictures, such presentations make it easier for children to pay attention to the words. Of course, some baby books, and easiest readers and concept books, are written this way; probably, more should be. Somebody ought to create a giant paper encyclopedia made this way. If done well, I think it would sell like hotcakes, and potentially teach a generation of kids to read better. The second function is that these presentations are primarily aimed at teaching concepts and vocabulary, or those facts that are so basic that they arguably form part of our concept of a thing. The latter—“teaching concepts and vocabulary”—probably sounds so insufferably dry that you can’t imagine a child not having to be forced to view such presentations. But that’s just not the case. Here I return to Doman. He insists over and over that babies love to learn, that they would rather learn than eat, etc. I doubt that’s always their top priority, but thinking of small children as deeply interested learners does seem to explain a lot of their behavior, and is supported by science; see Alison Gopnik’s The Philosophical Baby for reports on supporting research. And as it turns out, my son loves some of the most factual presentations I made on the driest-seeming subjects—would you believe chemistry and electricity? But also pigs in mud. Along the same lines, one of my son’s favorite books has been the Oxford Picture Dictionary, which he calls “op-ed” because the large letters “OPD” appear on the cover. We have been reading it through, systematically, just a few pages (at most) at a time, for something like two years. He frequently requests it and hasn’t yet gotten tired of it. This book is intended to help teach English as a second language, but I find it is excellent for teaching concepts and vocabulary to learners of English as a first language. I point to a word, say its name, then point to the picture that the word refers to (if necessary—often, the word is just below the picture). Then, if I think the meaning of the word is unclear to my son, I give it a quick gloss I think he can understand. Sometimes this leads to questions and further explanations. In this way I have explained basic concepts about practically everything about the world. For some reason, he strongly prefers OPD to the children’s picture dictionaries and encyclopedias we have found, and we have several. (By “strongly prefers” I mean that he frequently requests OPD, and he basically can’t stand looking at the others. I can’t figure out why.) I would be remiss if I did not mention that my wife, a language teacher from another country, speaks another language exclusively to my son, so he is bilingual (without much “formal” training; but we’ve done some Rosetta Stone and reading in that language, and he can read some words in that language as well). So he is learning words for the same concepts in two languages. He not infrequently uses a word in the other language if he does not know it as well in English. I sometimes have to ask him what the word means in English, and he is sometimes able to give me a translation. I believe that having been taught concepts and vocabulary explicitly—even if it is unfashionable to do so—has greatly improved my son’s abilities to read, to comprehend written language, and to speak well. While being able to read (meaning, here, decode text) is an important tool for developing vocabulary, comprehension, and speaking abilities, being introduced directly to concepts, with clear language and pictures, really helps as well. I should add in all honesty that I personally have no proof of these claims. It may have been more efficient in teaching these language skills to do something else than to teach concepts and vocabulary explicitly, and let him learn vocabulary more often from context. I would be delighted to discover that some researchers had taken up the question of the efficacy of Doman-style presentations and/or similar media (PowerPoints and concept books) for the extremely young, but I am not aware of any studies. At least I can say that it does not seem to have been an entire waste of time. I have noticed my son using many of the words and facts he was taught from presentations, and I trust that whenever he is engaged with some material, then he is learning. When he is not engaged with the material, we quickly stop and move on to something else. 7. Other educational activities that helped with learning to read There are a wide variety of other educational activities that have supported my son’s ability to read (and learn more generally). In no particular order, here is an extensive but still incomplete list. · For a period of many months, I told him what different road signs said, and I also occasionally asked him to read some signs. Pretty soon he was offering the information himself. He took a great interest in signs and so I made a series of PowerPoint presentations about them. Reading store signs and other signs became one of his favorite pastimes when we were in the car; he still points out and reads the more unusual signs. · On several occasions when he was 2 and 3, I wrote down his stories; usually it was just him narrating something that happened to him, but sometimes it was wholly made-up. He always got a big kick out of reading his own words. · When he was three, I think inspired in part by my writing down his stories, he took to telling me stories at bedtime. I encouraged this and we did it for many months. His stories used all sorts of bizarre and imaginative remixtures of plots, characters, and objects picked up from his reading and experience. · I let him play on the computer a fair bit, so he can use the mouse well and hunt-and-peck a few words. When he was two and three, I often started my word processing program and increased the font size to something really big, then he would just bang on the keyboard, but sometimes he would write out a few words with my help. He still practices his reading abilities as he navigates the Internet; usually I get him onto some educational website, then sometimes he takes over. More than once, all by himself, he clicked my WatchKnow.org favorites bar link, then typed in “pig” in the search engine. Note, by age 4 he still had not learned how to write (he could write only a few easy capital letters). · One thing that made a few books more interesting for my son was to use PowerPoint presentations explaining vocabulary from those books. We did this with Charlotte’s Web and a few others. · We regularly look at a globe placed near the dining room table. We play “How about Right There”: once, when he was two, I said, “Let’s imagine we could take a trip anywhere in the world, but we didn’t know where we were going to go. We could go…how about…right there!” As I said this I would spin the globe, without looking at it, and put my finger randomly somewhere on it. Then I would say something about where we landed. My son got a big kick out of that, and requested to play it again and again. He still does; on his fourth birthday we were still playing it pretty often. We also looked at maps and atlases a lot. · At our local Wal-Mart type store we bought several sets of 24-piece puzzles, each puzzle showing a different topic. There is writing (labels) on these puzzles, and putting them together, usually with some help, has (among other things) reinforced many concepts as well as his reading skills. We also did some map puzzles and, again, reading skills were both used and reinforced in doing these. · When my son was a toddler, we went over nursery rhymes and songs repeatedly, so much so that he memorized many of them. · My son’s current favorite toy is Legos, which he’s learned how to play very well. I went a little beyond the call of duty in making sets of organizer drawers, with labels on them, for his Legos. To my surprise, he very quickly memorized the labels, and knows where all the pieces go. I am sure that this is good practice not just for reading but for conceptual-analytical ability as well. But it certainly took a (mostly fun) time investment on my part. We also have spent many hours with a Radio Shack “Electronic Snap Kit,” which involves reading and interpreting some instructions (and learning about electronic circuits and components). · I don’t know how much it has helped with reading, but certainly he has been exposed to new vocabulary and concepts by helping me do half of the experiments out of Chemistry for Every Kid. We read all of this together. Since it is all in support of gee-whiz experiments, he usually pays excellent attention to the explanations, even though he probably understands only half of the text. I try as best as I can to explain simply the scientific jargon and explanations in the text. · Just since spring 2010 we’ve been doing a lot of new apps on the iPod touch and iPad. Some of these seem quite good for reading development, such as dot-to-dot games that reinforce the alphabet, touch-writing tutors that teach handwriting and spelling, a Speak-and-Spell emulator, etc. 8. Plans for our second child While I was working on this essay, our family added another boy. In his first month, I started showing baby #2 a variety of iPad baby apps. I have also started reading the same baby board books to him that I used with our first boy. As long as baby is paying attention (i.e., gazing with interest at the book or screen), and is not getting too excited—that is a sign of overstimulation, at this age—I show him stuff for as long as he wants. This is usually not longer than five minutes. I also show him some music apps, which have the added benefit of calming down a fussy baby. Will I do anything different with baby #2? Not a lot—mainly I’ll just do more of the same, as long as he is interested and engaged. We’ll do more alphabet books. We’ll get a half-dozen more and read them often. I am sure we will use YBCR, probably beginning around six months—or when he can focus and be interested in what’s going on on TV. While I do worry that he’ll learn to read using a whole word method (and as a result, he might be less able to understand phonics), I’m not very worried about this. When I am satisfied that he can understand the sounds the letters make, and once he can speak, I’ll try using my phonics flash cards using the method I used with my first. When this will be depends on him, of course. We’ll also do more of what Doman calls “encyclopedic knowledge.” This will take the form of sets of pictures (and names to go with them) of different categories of things. By the time he’s ready for them, I should have started making a lot more of my own presentations, which have simple sentences, beyond single words. I’m especially excited about this. WatchKnow’s funder, who pays for my work, is enthusiastic in support of what will essentially be a massive children’s encyclopedia, covering every topic that can be taught (gainfully) to young children. I look forward not only to writing this, even more I look forward to using the results with my two boys. I will probably be blogging about our progress at larrysanger.org.





PART 2: teaching the very young to read—a defense I now switch gears. While our story perhaps carries various implicit lessons, any critical-thinking person who is very new to the whole subject of very early reading is still apt to have many questions and objections. A friend told me, “I don’t know what the point of this essay is; all you have to do is show your video to the world.” But I disagree. When skeptics view the video, most of them say, “But your kid just has smart genes.” This makes it easy to ignore the possibility that, in fact, all children have a similar potential. In the following, I have attempted to state and honestly deal with every problem and criticism I have come across, or could think of, about teaching babies and toddlers to read. But, again, I don’t pretend to have the final word. It is important for researchers to note I am beginning with the easiest-to-respond-to criticisms. I do not get to the sort of criticisms articulated by the more sophisticated, well-informed critics until Section 7 or so. For example, not until Section 9 do I address the notion that toddlers and preschoolers are not developmentally ready to benefit from reading, because they do not understand what they are reading well enough. This objection must be taken seriously, and is much more sophisticated than the relatively simple objection that toddlers will never do anything more than “word calling,” a problem relatively quickly dispatched in Section 1. And it isn’t until Section 12 that I get to another important objection: that early reading has no long-term advantages. I spend a long time on that one. So I begin with a defense of the general notion that it is possible to teach tiny tots to read in the first place. You might be surprised to learn that, in my opinion, this is pretty much the easiest thing to establish on the subject. 1. Yes, it is possible This must be a joke or scam. It isn’t really possible to teach babies and toddlers to read, right? If you just did not know that it is possible to teach one-year-olds to learn to recognize individual written words, you may be in for a shock. The quickest way to convince yourself that this is at least plausible is to watch some YouTube videos. Try this YouTube search, then this one, then this one. Go ahead, watch some videos now, if you haven’t done so already; it will place the rest of this essay in an essential context. If you aren’t familiar with such videos or have never seen a very small child read, the rest of this is probably going to sound bizarre, and you probably won’t understand it. Are you convinced? If you weren’t convinced before, you’re probably not convinced now. You are probably just skeptical or confused now. That’s understandable; it was my first reaction, too. The whole idea of teaching babies to read sounds ridiculous at first. So let’s reply to a few doubts that might spring to mind. And first things first: Isn’t this just a dishonest trick? Nope. Nobody’s whispering the words to the kids, for instance. The videos aren’t dubbed over. And the kids really are that young. There’s at least one video of a 9-month-old girl who, for example, touches her toes when she sees the word “toes.” Quite a few sub-one-year-olds have learned to do that sort of stuff. The sheer quantity of the videos should be enough to establish that it’s not just trickery. I mean, if you don’t want to take my word for it that it’s not trickery, just watch a whole bunch of videos and I think you’ll find your doubts, on that score anyway, disappearing. Aren’t the children just memorizing the order of words? If a tot has learned the words properly, as many of these tots have, the words can be presented on flash cards and presented in any order you wish. They aren’t just memorizing the order of the words. Again, I have long experience of this with my own boy, and many others appear to have similar experience. (I found it hard to keep our flash cards in any order, actually, as parents with little kids will be able to understand.) Haven’t the little book-readers just memorized the books? Lots of non-readers do that, you know. Some of the videos purport to show tiny book-readers. You might suspect that the tots aren’t reading, that they’ve just memorized the books, as in this case. Of course, that’s impressive too; their parents are rightly proud of their children’s ability to memorize. Also, of course people put up videos of their children cutely “pretending” to read. So how do you know the children are really reading? First, just look at some other videos in those video searches. In a number of them, it sure doesn’t look like a child has memorized the book, like (just to take one of many examples) this one. Finally, if you can take my word for it, then just know that my own boy was reading his first books (very simple ones, like Go Dog Go) shortly after his second birthday, and by age 29 months he was reading Little Bear. Have a look at our video, if you haven’t yet. I could show him brand new books, or write brand new sentences for him, and he could read them out loud with little trouble. The clips from when my boy was 3½ should be a little more convincing—he read the bit about two- and three-stroke engines from a book that he selected at random, and I don’t think he had ever read that question or answer before. Anyway, in many of these videos, those little kids really are decoding the words, in response to seeing the text on the page. In other words, they’re reading (in that sense). Again, watch a bunch of videos and you’ll probably be able to entertain seriously the proposition that they aren’t just memorizing the book. At least that’s the conclusion I came to, although I admit I didn’t become 100% convinced of it until I saw my own little boy doing the same. If the children really are decoding the text so early, aren’t they hyperlexic ? Hyperlexia is a disorder in which a very young child spontaneously picks up how to decode written language, but without comprehension. It is associated with autism. I’ve never come across any discussion or video online that suggests that one can induce hyperlexia by deliberately teaching a tiny tot how to read in the ways described here. In my many conversations online with other parents (mostly mothers) who have taught their small children to read, none of the parents with early-reading tots have said that their children were diagnosed hyperlexic. We naturally care a lot about our children and if we had any fears on this score, we would have them checked out, and at least some of us would share the information with others. (By the way, two small online communities I frequent, the BrillKids.com Forum and the TeachYourBabyToRead Yahoo! group, are woefully underserved by the research community—in my experience, not one reading researcher or early education expert has waded into these communities either to challenge or to educate. So we are left to figure things out for ourselves and share information.) I tried YBCR (or Doman ) with my child, and it didn’t work for us. So, not all small children can learn to read. Let me first clarify this: I would not claim that all babies and toddlers can learn to read before the age of three, any more than I would claim that all children can learn to read before the age of seven. I wish both things were true, but I am a realist. Sometimes, the right circumstances simply don’t come together. I make the more modest claim that many people who try it with their children will succeed. What is the proportion? I wish I knew, but I don’t have a clue. My best guess is a majority. But then, maybe it’s a minority, and I simply don’t hear about the many failures. This is one reason why I think there’s an urgent need for studies of very early reading programs—precisely to settle questions such as this. What if it turns out that 80% of under-twos who start a program, and use it according to instructions, can decode words phonetically by age three? That would be huge news. The children who are successfully taught to read early must be profoundly gifted. Your boy probably has “smart genes.” But surely, most children can’t learn this way. Despite some of the hype from people selling products and from some of the parents, I don’t think kids who learn to read at an early age are necessarily “geniuses.” Critics generally assert that those children who are able to read with facility and comprehension from an early age were “gifted” to begin with, with the implication that average-intelligence kids cannot be taught to read at a very early age. I was lucky enough to get an email from Tufts child developmentalist, Maryanne Wolf, and that was her opinion of my own son: he is “more than likely one the outliers on the y axis” of the famous bell-shaped curve of various human attributes. I disagree with both the hype and the critics: toddlers who can read are not necessarily geniuses, any more than are toddlers who can use sign language. In discussion with other parents online who use these programs—and with all due respect to these often wonderful, generous parents—I’ve seen little indication that the babies who have been taught to read come from unusually brilliant genes. Many parents who use Doman and other early learning programs admit they themselves did not do very well in school, and occasionally admit to being no geniuses themselves; they just want to give their children an advantage. Both Doman and Titzer, who have considerable experience with the range of kids who are taught to read early, have said that success in being taught to read early, in their experience, is not a simple function of intelligence. If they are to be believed, there are many parents of average intelligence who have taught their babies and toddlers to decode many words. And most persuasive, if you can accept the claims, is that Doman developed his early reading program originally for brain-damaged children, and he claims that many of such children have been taught to read independently by their preschool years using his methods. Such reports would give support to the notion that genius-level genes aren’t necessary for the success of the “baby reading” programs. Aren’t these children merely memorizing a handful of words by shape? Now we move into somewhat more difficult objections. Some critics say that, even if very small children of average or low intelligence can memorize words, they’re just memorizing the overall shape of the word—they aren’t sounding out the words or learning phonics, and so they aren’t really reading. Some leading methods of teaching babies and toddlers to read, including Doman’s and Titzer’s, might seem open to this criticism, because they involve showing tots words in a fairly haphazard way, but over and over again. (To be precise, though, while Titzer’s videos feature a lot of repetition, Doman’s method would have the parent flash a word to a child only a half-dozen times or so over a period of a few days, and then that word is taken out of rotation.) Such methods, which resemble the old “whole word” or “look-and-say” methods of reading, do not explicitly teach kids to sound out new words phonetically (i.e., according to the sounds that the individual letters make), which—I agree—is the sine qua non of genuine decoding ability. I have three responses to this. First, a simple point. The font style and color in YBCR and many Doman-inspired presentations are deliberately varied. Moreover, many very early readers (including my son) have shown they could read cursive handwriting without any sort of systematic exposure to it at all. The point is that the children are apparently not depending on cues related to font. Second, Titzer claims to have observed many kids who have picked up phonetic rules automatically. The Doman camp makes similar claims too. The idea is, for example, that after a kid learns “same” and “game” and “tame,” he begins to understand that the “e” at the end of the word makes the “a” say its name. He doesn’t have to be taught this rule explicitly; he just picks it up inductively. Titzer also claims that the plastic early brain—the ability of baby brains to be easily “wired” and “rewired” in radically different ways—is ideally suited to learn just such rules. That’s largely the same way the brain quickly learns to pick out individual words from the steady stream of consonants and vowels and eventually to understand the grammatical rules of spoken English. Confirming evidence for the predicted effect, as far as I know, is just anecdotal. I’ve seen many claims from parents in online discussion groups that their children, as young as one year old, are able to sound out new words. That is, there are tiny tots who have gone through these programs who are able to sound out words they’ve never seen before, just as if they had learned explicit phonics—according to their parents, who are highly interested in such abilities. By the way, phonics is worked in a little in the Your Baby Can Read series and some more in the follow-up Your Child Can Read series. Another program that incorporates some elements of phonics is the BrillKids “Little Reader” software. Third, if you aren’t convinced that your child will pick up the rules “on the fly,” you don’t have to teach your kid to read in a “haphazard” way at all. As I explained in Part 1, I presented flash cards to my boy based on phonetic groupings, and it was plain to see that he was picking up the rules as we went from set to set. But, somewhat to my surprise, I also noticed that he was learning to read many words well before we learned the rules that would allow him to sound out those words. Probably, Titzer is right that kids do learn phonetic rules “on the fly” and “in context,” but I suspect that presenting words to kids according to progressively arranged phonetic groupings will help them in this learning process. Obviously, careful empirical study is needed. However the children do it, by the time they’re two or three, many of them who started reading earlier can sound out new words. For example, here’s a two-year-old phonetically sounding out “slipper” (at 3:41). My own son is another example, and of course many other examples of very young children using phonics can be found on YouTube. The point in any case is that these early learners can sound out new words, in fact, and it is possible to carry out programs similar to Doman’s and Titzer’s that use systematic phonics. These two points partially (but do not completely) defang a point made frequently by reading specialists, such as Trevor Cairney, who offer warnings about the YBCR videos, criticizing them because they appear only to teach babies to memorize whole words. Cairney says in a blog post that the videos teach children only to “recognise instantly a number of words,” while full-bodied reading requires that they “learn the sounds of language and their correspondence with print” and “understand the structure of language and how it works.” Such objections can be powerful especially for those who, like me, are supporters of synthetic, intensive, systematic phonics. But I think the advisability of teaching early reading does not stand or fall with the merits of the whole word method. Moreover, I’ve encountered several parents online who started their babies reading using the Doman method and later, after a few years, introduced phonics systematically. Whether this helps to mitigate any problems that phonics supporters might have with the whole word learning methods, I have no idea—I’d guess it does. But certainly, you don’t have to buy into the whole word/whole language approach in order to support very early reading. A child who has learned to read very early does not master other skills that are traditionally taught, in kindergarten and first grade, at the same time as reading, such as handwriting, spelling, the first rudiments of grammar and punctuation, etc. Doesn’t that show claims that “your baby can read” ultimately to be misleading? The first claim here is perfectly true. I have discovered that even at age four, my boy could not quickly locate a letter in an alphabetical list of letters (so he did not know the order or placement of letters very well); he was around average in his handwriting skills; while he could spell some words, he didn’t spell a lot (but some early-educated kids can do this); and he had barely started to learn the difference between a noun and a verb. So some kindergarten and first grade skills were still quite challenging for him. But he could decode at or above the fifth grade level, and his vocabulary, comprehension, and ability to detect misspelled words (for example, “nite”) were all quite advanced for his age (not as advanced as his decoding ability, of course). This is a problem only if you had the notion that when people say “your baby can read” they mean “your baby is ready to start kindergarten language arts”—which is absolutely false, and I don’t think anyone claims that it is true. To be sure, there are various things you can do to accelerate a very young child’s understanding of kindergarten language arts, if you wanted to do that. But I fully concede that there are some things about language that, no matter what techniques you use, you just can’t teach to a baby or toddler. It’s just that decoding written English—that particular skill, as hard as it is for so many first graders—is not one of those more advanced skills. I think our experience, like that of other parents I’ve talked with, indicates that learning to decode written English is not terribly difficult for very young children to learn. Most people simply don’t know this. It’s just “barking at print”; it’s not really reading. Some tiny children might be able to decode written language, but they aren’t getting meaning from it. Many educationists, if pressed, will acknowledge that it may look like some babies and toddlers can read, but they will immediately dismiss what’s going on as “barking at print” or “word calling.” These contemptuous descriptions mean that kids can say words out loud, but they don’t really understand what they are appear to be reading. I have two responses to this. First, the one- and two-year-olds in those videos are usually shown words like “hi” and “dog” and “nose,” all of which are probably words that the kids understand perfectly well wh