Yes, I did YBCR and my own flashcards, which aren’t that different from Doman-type flashcards. I’m writing an essay explaining what we did. Here’s the summary part about what we did…there are many more details…I should be finished soon.
PART 2
How my little boy learned to read as a toddler
In this second part of the essay, I am going to go into extreme detail about how I have taught my own son how to read, and also something about other educational activities that have supported his reading ability. The point of this is to provide the public one detailed example of how a child was taught to read at an early age. My point is not to suggest that this is the only way to teach a young child to read. I hope that researchers might regard this as a very in-depth case study of a very early reader who was taught to read using both systematic phonics flashcards and Your Baby Can Read, as well as copious reading. At the end of this part I am going to offer some speculations about the meaning of our experience.
I. Early literacy activities
We have read a lot to our son since he was 3 or 6 months (I don’t remember exactly when we started). He 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 and lots every day, at least an hour a day, probably more like 2-3 hours on some days (but spread out throughout the day). We plowed through many books daily, often a dozen, sometimes more. These included, importantly, a half dozen or so ABC books.
When he was 18 months or so we bought him the LeapFrog “Alphabet Bus” (there are many products that do the same thing). We noticed he was pressing the buttons (one button for each letter) 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 knew almost all his letters by 18-20 months.
I then started hunting around on online about when kids start learning the alphabet, which led to the discovery that some babies are taught to read as…babies? What? But I saw it on YouTube and, after hours of exploration there and elsewhere online, it was hard to deny that something was going on there.
We got him refrigerator magnets and after we played a little with him and them, he actually spelled out and sounded out “dog.” That convinced me that he might be capable of learning to read.
II. My eclectic method of teaching a small child to read: summary
Before my son was two years old, we read an enormous number of books and did various other pre-literacy activities. When we started to teach him to read, we did three things basically at once: videos, reading flashcards, and the finger-under-the-words trick.
When he was about 22 months, we got Your Baby Can Read. My boy absolutely loved the videos and demanded to see them as often as possible (but we never showed them more than once a day, and my wife slowed it down to every other day). Still, he got through all of them 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. It’s not just the songs, but those are nice. I think it’s the fact that the arrow is under a word as it is being read, which I believe excites the kids. It shows them that all these squiggles they see around them, which we know as print, actually match up with words they can hear. I think the written-spoken language connection is very exciting to little ones. The excitement really is due to the clarification of language. Also, the words themselves were chosen to be accessible and interesting to babies. After the word comes a short video demonstrating the meaning of the word, which is also very welcome to babies, I think. The videos clarify the meanings of those familiar words. I think the reason my son and many other children are excited by these videos is that they essentially make sense of their world 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 learned all the words in all the videos (a few hundred, I think).
Starting at the same time, I started making flashcards (uploaded here) out of the word lists in the back of Rudolf Flesch’s pro-phonics polemic Why Johnny Can’t Read. (At the time, I didn’t know about Doman except, maybe, from a few articles about his methods online.) Anyway, 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 8.5/11 page. After about six months, we had gone through over half of Flesch’s phonetic rules and my boy gradually learned to read (sound out) many hundreds of words. As to which words to teach, I was careful to pick words that I knew he understood when spoken, or that I could explain (so it became a great vocabulary lesson too—his vocabulary increased by leaps and bounds, as he used words that were on cards). It was pretty quick and easy to make the cards, by the way. I ended up making over 1,000 cards, and he ended up learning how to learn a lot more than that, even by the time 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. Another reason I know that he was following along is that I occasionally misread a word, and he corrected me. In fact, when I intentionally misread a word, he almost always caught it and corrected me. There is actually a book, Native Reading by Timothy D. Kailing, which advocates teaching children to read with the finger-under-the-text technique. I am virtually certain that my own boy has advanced his reading ability far beyond the videos and flashcards 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 read chapter books. Among many others, we’ve read Stuart Little, and by request two times each through Pinocchio, Charlotte’s Web, and The Trumpet of the Swan, as well as the first twenty “Magic Tree House†books. He loves the more advanced books, in moderation, despite there being all sorts of words that I have to explain. In fact he does listen to my explanations patiently, 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).
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 stories and poems that allow the student to click on a word to hear its 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). Where he wouldn’t want to read a Dr. Seuss book that was well within his ability, he would read a Starfall or Literactive story that was no easier with few compunctions. Both of these websites are very nicely levelled, too. (They have inspired me to design and, I hope, produce an even bigger educational site like them, a small children’s online multimedia encyclopedia.)
Other tools we’ve used with good effect are the LeapFrog refrigerator phonics (the 3-letter kind), and a similar 4-letter 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, but we purchased it after he was well on his way to reading, so it didn’t get much use.
I think these methods and tools have led to success. As I draft this section, December 2009, he is 3 years 7 months and, based on tests I’ve found online, is decoding text (not to say reading) at about the fifth grade level. It has been about 21 months since he first started reading those 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 feels “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. We have an enormous collection of books at home (three bookcases stuffed 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.
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, the Titzer videos, the 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, as I’ll explain a little more below), he was reading better. So if I had to pick one, it would be the flashcards. But this is not certain, because he’s made very steady progress, and he’s picked up a lot of words that he couldn’t sound out based on the rules I’ve “explicitly†introduced. So I think he’s learned a fair bit of phonics “implicitly,†as Titzer says in his materials. 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 (we read loads) might have been more important than anything. Still, for the reason I gave, I think the phonics training with the cards has been the single most essential element of the program. Basically, in six months, between ages of 1 and 2, he went from being a non-reader, to reading CVC (“dog”) words almost right away, to reading all sorts of stuff, multisyllabic words, “silent e” words, etc. In another year he was decoding at the fifth grade level or so.
