Hi everyone,
I am a member from Briilkids from Oct 2010 and my son Ken who started to use Little Reader at that time could achieve to read fluently in a little more than a year.
Could I get my 13-year-old son to learn English in the same way using Little Reader?
In anticipation.
I’ve never used LR (no kid yet) - so adjust the weight you give my response accordingly.
LR is a system of learning, a tool that uses a particular style of educating that has shown interesting and effective for little ones. Unless a child is adverse to using the program, it should work for ANY age, and this seems to be a good application of the program IMO. You’re really learning language syntax and sentence structure in addition to vocabulary through associations between word and picture - this is an excellent way to learn a foreign language in my humble opinion.
I think it can’t hurt. Although, I would imagine the older one gets the harder it will be, but that is true for any language learning program. The reason why LR is so effective for babies is because babies brains are designed to soak up language. I think a 13 year old could use it and learn something but would definitely need to study grammar separately.
I have been teaching my kids words in Russian for a while, a language that is 100% foreign to me. I did not know the letters or letter sounds of the Cyrillic alphabet, but we were learning lots of whole words and repeating the pronunciation. I encountered a word in Russian I had never seen before at my daughter’s school. I turned to the native speaker next to me and said, “Does that say garmoshka?” She said yes and you cannot even imagine how excited I was! I gave her a high five and had a huge smile across my face. I learned to read a new word without ever having learned letters or letter sounds, I intuited them just by being exposed to lots of words. That week I sat down and started to teach myself the alphabet but it was a huge breakthrough and now I know exactly how my kids felt when it happened for them…so proud!
So I say, if you have it, use it. You son is old enough to grasp the concept of letters and letter sounds easily, and I would teach that alongside LR and download more LR phonics lessons, but I would absolutely use LR to start teaching him. It will certainly help build his vocabulary and it’s a great place to start! I would probably have him write and say the words as he encounters them, and possibly do more lessons each day if he can keep up.