I have begun compiling bit of intelliegence cards for teaching the kiddos. Wow does this take alot of work! I was wonderieng if anybody out there was finding this as daunting a task as I am? If anybody is doing this, can you tell me any good sites to find information? Thanks.
I don’t do too much of encyclopedic learning with Felicity, but I think many here do, and have created many wonderful categories for Little Reader. Give them a try! (eg., planets, dinosaurs, paintings, inventors, presidents, etc.)
Yes, there are many great categories here. The hard work is finding the extra 10 “programs of intelligence”.
sorry, what are you referring to? :unsure:
Here down is the post where I explained in more details how Doman recommends it. Finding the pictures is only first step but then you need to find and teach the information about that Bit of Inteligence (picture). And Doman refers to this information as Programs of Inteligence. I think any good encyclopledia would do the job and help you with these pieces of information.
And it would be great if we could share them because I think many
parents do not even try to start this program because it is so time consuming to gather the information…
http://forum.brillkids.com/general-discussion-b5/question-about-flash-cards/
I will try to explain in more details how Doman recommends teaching baby encyclopedic knowledge.
We should start by showing categories of related pictures (just to remind - picture=BIT of inteligence-must have accurate detail, must be one item only, must be specifically named, must be new, large and clear). Fist you should start introducing 3 categories of 10 pictures each, very fast, the best 10-15 sec for each category. Rules for adding new and retiring old cards are the same as I mentioned earlier - after about 10 days (it may be earlier - depends of your child) every day retire 1 old and add 1 new picture to each category. If your baby wants you can refresh categories even faster (but never slower).
When you have taught your child 1,000 Bit of Inteligence cards, you should start creating Program of Intelligence. Each new program within a category adds a higher magnitude, starting with the most simple information and ending with the most profound.
Example:Division: Biology
Category: Birds
Bit of Intelligence card: Common Crow
1st Magnitude Program: Crows build nests in trees or bushes.
2ndMagnitude Program: Crows’ nests are made of twigs lined with grass or hair.
3rd Magnitude Program: Crows eat insects, seed, fruit and nuts.
4th Magnitude Program: Crows have been known to eat mollusks, dead animals, mice, eggs, fish, garbage, rubber, puttz and plastic insulation.
5th Magnitude Program: The female cow raises one brood per year.
6th Magnitude Program: The voice of the crow is hars and loud, not musical.
7th Magnitude Program: Crows are part of the Corvidae Family.
and it can go on and on…
Initially you should aim to do a Program of Intelligence of the 1st Magnitude on every retired card in all your categories. As you complete this step you begin to build to higher and higher magnitudes in all of the categories.
And finally how to teach Program of Intelligence:
One session should consist of no more than five programs. Programs take longer to read aloud than Bit of Intelligence cards and in order to keep sessions short you need to do fewer of them.
So for example you take 5 retired cards of birds and you say as you show them:
Crow - “Crows build nests in trees or bushes.”
Robin - “Robins have red breasts and gray wings.”
Bluejay - …
Mockingbird - …
Cardinal Grosbeak - …
This should take about 10-15 seconds. You can also choose to use large-print sentences instead of showing the actual Bit of Intelligence card. Whatever you decide, it should be very fast and fun.
You should befin with 5 categories of 5 program each. Do each category three times in the day. You can expang this to include as many categories as you wish. After 5 days retire all the programs and put in five new programs in each category. This means a new program will be done three times over five days, to total fifteen times before being retired. If you wish you can retire and add new ones faster.
When you have done many Programs of Intelligence of the Fist Magnitude you begin to teach programs of the Second Magnitude. And then third and so on…
Doman’s general rules of teaching aply here as well.
Begin as young as possible.
Be joyous at all times.
Respect and trust your child.
Teach only when you and your child are happy.
Create a good learning environment.
Stop before your child wants to stop.
Introduce new materials often.
Be organized and consistent.
Do not test your child.
Prepare your materials carefully and stay ahead.
Remember the Fail-Safe Law: If you are not having a wonderfull time and your child is not having a wonderful time - stop. You are doing something wrong.
Yes, it is the “extra information” I was talking about. I would love to share info with others. As of now, just about all of my “programs” are right from Doman. I only have about a month worth of material right now, so we haven’t started yet. I feel like I would always be behind. I know it seems like a lot, but I would like to have about 6 months of info before we start, so I wouldn’t feel like I was always rushed to find material. I wouldn’t be very joyous teaching that way!
Thanks for the excellent and comprehensive info, Martina - you sure do know your stuff! 
Just wondering, couldn’t you do this with Little Reader?
Taking your birds example:
Crow - "Crows build nests in trees or bushes." Robin - "Robins have red breasts and gray wings." Bluejay - ............. Mockingbird - .................. Cardinal Grosbeak - .......................
For the above, you would simply record the extra info as an audio file to go with the picture, so you show the word “crow”, then picture of a crow with the picture audio saying something like, “Crow. Crows build nests in trees or bushes.”
If you wanted to continue with extra ‘bits’ for crow, then you can also set the number of pics/vids shown to 5 (let’s say), and the playback would go like:
- show word “crow” (pronunciation “crow”)
- picture 1 of crow building nests + picture audio “Crows build nests in trees or bushes.”
- picture 2 of crow’s nest + picture audio “Crows’ nests are made of twigs lined with grass or hair.”
- picture 3 + picture audio…
- picture 4 + picture audio…
- picture 5 + picture audio…
Let me know if there is a limitation to LR which prevents you from using it to teach these ‘bits’ efficiently, and maybe we can tweak it some more to make sure you will be able to!
Yes, I know what Doman says in his books that I have read. lol But I actually has not started the “Programs of Intelligence” yet either. 
Having materials prepared I would surely have done. :yes:
And yes, I was thinking about using Little Reader to teach encyclopedic knowledge. In my opinion - KL, what you sugest is too complicated - creating information AND the pictures showing what the sentences (“Programs of Inteligence”) say would be too demanding and complicated and for parents dificult and time consuming to create these categoris (to find relevant pictures for each information). Parents can not easily gather the information themselves and finding relevant pictures to each information would be even more dificult. I think that I would follow Domans metod and show main picture with saying the sentence OR showing the actual sencence (words) while reading it.
And how this can be done with Little Reader? Here is one suggestion that requires programming. :tongue2:
Every word in Little Reader has its file name, word display and then
- Pronunciation
- Picture/Video
- Picture audio.
I would change a bit Picture audio part. It would enable to type the sentences and/or attached the MP3 to each information. It can be preset like only 1 line with possibility to add more lines if you want… And you woud check or uncheck which one you want to play with the picture … This way any category you play for your baby to teach reading could be easily used as one for encyclopedic teaching as well (if you decide to)… You just decide to play the category with pictures and audios of 1st (or 2nd or 3rd or…) Program of Inteligence. (BTW, it would move teaching reading into higher level as well if you decide to show the sencences instead of pictures).
Does it sound too complicated to programme? :tongue2:
(I was even thinking about another Program itself - Little Encyclopedia Maker or something… lol) If it is too complicated to programme then we can think about easier way to do it with present Little Reader.
I think what KL is saying is just record an extra audio file(pronunciation) for each “program”. You don’t need a new picture for the new “program”. With Doman’s flash card method, you don’t find a new picture for each “program”, you use the same one. I can’t believe I didn’t think of such a great idea. Wow that makes the whole thing even easier. Still have to do the research, but it feels less daunting thinking of it this way. The limitations I see are: How many pronunciation files each word can have. You would need at least 11 for each word ( the word itself and 10 “program” files). You would also need a way like Martina was saying to check off which files you want to play each time, because you don’t do all 10 “programs” at once. Wow, I have to get off line right now but I will think more what I would need to make little reader work for this. Great suggestion KL!
Another function that would be useful would be the abilty to turn the word “off”. In other words, just show the picture. Some categories don’t really lend themselves to reading. Like if I wanted to teach about airplanes. Showing the letters b-737 or f-22 isn’t really useful. I know this isn’t what LR is for but it might help.
This would be a great way for everyone to share even more knowledge. It is much easier to check that 10 facts are correct than to come up with 10 original facts about a category. If each member contributed just one category with 10 programs, everyone could give their child encyclopedic knowledge!
You can turn the word off. In playback select the drop down menu on the top right hand side and turn it to picture flash. Then only the picture and pronunciations will play.
Thank you! I didn’t know that. Do you know how many audio files each word can hold?
Nope. KL will though…
I don’t think there is a practical limit as to how many media files you can attach to each part (whether pronunciation, picture, video, or picture audio), at least it’s going to be way more than the number of ‘bits’ of intelligence you can think up for the word!
Yes, you guys are getting the idea. One way you can use the current Little Reader to do what you want is to just use “Picture only (flash)” mode, and have multiple picture audio files. These will auto-rotate anyway, so each time you play back the word file it will play the next one, so you don’t have to specify which one gets played. And you can readjust the order again by using the up/down arrow buttons in the Edit Word dialog box in the Picture Audio section.
…
OK, you know what, just found a bug, and a program limitation in trying to implement the above.
Firstly, the picture audio is not rotating. It keeps playign back the first file. It is meant to rotate just like how the pictures rotate each time the word is played.
Secondly, if you set it to ‘picture only (flash)’ mode, it automatically forces it to play back the pronunciation file instead of the picture audio. (This was done deliberately because in typical picture flash mode, you show the picture and say the word). To get around this, for now, you would have to put the different program recordings into the pronunciation section instead of the picture audio section, or put it to ‘Word, Media’ mode (you would be forced to see the word first, but is that really a bad thing?).
But the above 2 issues can be easily remedied. Once remedied, each time you play back the word, it will play the next picture audio (as well as next pronunciation file), in sequence.
And if you want to do more than 1 program each time for each word, you just have to change the “Number of pics/vids shown” to, let’s say, 2. (But you must make sure you add the same picture at least twice so that there is more than 1 picture to play back. Or I’ll just change it such that if set to 2, it will just play back the same picture twice.)
Let me know if you think that will suffice, and in the meantime I will have those above ‘bugs’ fixed asap.
Good suggestion, KL :yes:, thank you.
Once the bugs are remedied it can serve well enough to enrich our teaching programmes (AmE programs lol) with teaching encyclopedic knowledge using Little Reader and sharing our “programs of inteligence”.
The limitation what I see is using this system for translating this “audio information” into different languages. I would want to teach my baby encyclopedic knowledge in her mother tongue, which is Czech. And it may be difficult for me to translate English that I hear only in audio and do not see typed. It would be partly solved if we agree to type these Programs of Inteligence (audios) into category description. This way we could easily translate into “our” languages. But on the other hand we would make the effort and it would take time to type it and we would not be able to use it to teach our children to read these sentences while teaching encyclopedic knowledge (as one option that Doman recommends). It would definitely be more challenging for them then to see the same picture for the … elevenths time. 
But anyway - your suggestion makes it work at least on some pretty good level. Once again THANK YOU.
I think you really need to be able to select which audio file you want to play. You don’t want it to cycle through all ten programs each time you show the file. The way the encylopedic knowledge program is done is that you do only 1st magnitude programs for like 500 different “bits” then you go back to the 2nd magnitude programs. As you increase magnitudes the information you give can relate to other categories. There is kind of an outline you follow for each category as to what “program” you do in what order.
I have created an encyclopedic knowledge program for my great inventors 1 category but I am having problems uploading it. Hopefully this will give you more of an idea of what I am talking about.
I think the file may be too large to upload. It is 27mb. What is the limit to upload? I will try to upload just one of the files in the category, maybe that will work.
Hi HeyBlue41!
Can you kindly try uploading your category using this link?
I believe I can try trimming the file size for you a little bit so that you can upload it in our File Downloads area.
Kindly PM me once you have finished uploading the file, so that I can go and check it out.
Cheers,
Lappy
Looking forward to seeing your upload, Heyblue!
We managed to squeeze in those fixes I mentioned into 1.05, so please give it a go and see if it can get close to what you need.
In fact, it’d be great if one of you could try creating an encyclopedic-style word set and share it with the rest of us! Save it as a Playlist and export it as a .pl file, so that users don’t have to tweak the playback settings and will see exactly what you want them to see!
hi i have been offline for a long period :(bad interent connection , and i missed many of the discussions .
regarding encyclopedic knowledge , there are so many ways to present programs of intelligence which i found with my experience with my daughter a lot more fun and practical . and KL you said you don’t do it with felicity but since your daughter is able to read here’s a wonderful way to do the program :
you can make all the ten magnitudes into a homemade book , if it is about bats you can add different photos of bats not just the bit card and it can be done for all bits .i find it more fun to read a book with my child than to just read the programs of information .
anyway my hurt child loved all information in whichever input , at the end she was reading all the programs of intelligence at the back of her cards independently ( she is a speed reader ) , but for her two years old mobile sister it is challenging and books are more appealing to her
hope this can help
love
viviane