Let's Teach Connor to Read

...starting today.

Ages ago, I saw a baby on Oprah or something like that (no, I don't regularly watch Oprah) who was about 18 months old and could read. Back then, I thought to myself, "I really want to do that with my baby, when I have one."

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when I decided that Connor was about the same age as the baby that I had seen on TV, and that I should figure out how to teach him to read. I got a book from the library called "How to Teach Your Baby to Read: the Gentle Revolution" by Glenn Doman and Janet Doman. Kevin actually started reading the book first, as I was working on the cross-stitch project for Grandpa's wedding gift. His first inclination was to keep our project a secret, but since then, we have both finished the book and decided that to keep it a secret would be a crime. Everyone should know how easy it is to teach children to read.

Similarly to how we taught Connor sign language because he can understand us but doesn't have the words to communicate back by speaking, babies can read to themselves, but not aloud. The problem with teaching them to read is that they need to develop their visual pathway, and that the print we show babies is usually too small.

We have been making word cards for Connor using 6" x 22" posterboard. We have over 200, and I finished the book today, so we are going to *officially* begin the program today. Connor has seen some of the cards before now as we made them, but today we really begin.

(This is me, realizing that this post is going to be very long.)

I want to post just a few snippets from the book...parts that I really love and want to remember. I plan to post more things from the book later, such as word lists and instructions. I think that will be another post (or more).

"There has never been, in the history of man, an adult scientist who has been half so curious as is any child between the ages of eighteen months and four years. We adults have mistaken this superb curiosity about everything as a lack of ability to concentrate."

"As Winston Churchill once said, 'Men occasionally stumble on the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.'"

"For many generations grandparents have been advising their sons and daughters to enjoy their children because, they have warned, all too soon the children will be grown up and gone. Like much good advice that has been passed on from one generation to another, it is rarely heeded until it has happened. When it has happened it is, of course, too late to do anything about it."

1. Each method used in teaching tiny children to read was successful.
2. Each of them used large print.
3. Each of them stressed the absolute necessity for feeling and expressing joyousness in the process.

"To almost the precise degree that a parent's attitude is joyous will he succeed in teaching his child to read."

The only other point that I want to make here is that the younger the child, the easier it is for them to absorb information. Even though an infant cannot demonstrate for you that they have retained the information by any method that a school would use, they have. I've noticed this with Connor and the sign language, among other things, so I believe it. In fact, you can apparently start this program right from birth with great success. Birth. I totally buy it.