Hi - I am about to embark on making my educational materials next week (finally on maternity leave!).
Glen Doman recommends 3/4 inch red dots stuck on 11x11 inch cardboard.
Many kind people have put up word documents with red dots on paper which is letter paper sized or A4.
My questions to the forum parents who have taught their children math are:
Does it really matter whether you have a square card or rectangular card?
- it would be much easier to print the premade dot cards onto A4 card board (and most cost effective)
Does it matter if the dots aren’t 3/4 inch? Would it be a problem to use 1/2 inch dots if making my own cards?
I presume 3/4 inch sized dots have been chosen because of their size … if the dot is a little smaller eg 1/2 inch or bigger 1 inch - is it a problem? I can’t find any red dots 3/4 inch available in Aus … I could colour in white dots but it would take forever to do 5050 dots!
The basic kit is for USD 50 and they currently have 20% discount off that price. You need to add delivery cost though.
To share with you my view in regards to your questions:
I don’t think it matters we present the dots in square or rectangular cards. The dots should be placed in a random pattern. In the book of teaching a child to read, Doman said not to be so rigid with the paper size and go with what is available in your location. I suppose same principle, we can be a bit flexible in adopting Doman’s method.
The square makes sense though if you want to follow Doman’s method to the book, that is teaching quantity, equations everything using flash cards. Square because you write at the back in all four corners number the quantity card represent and lists of equations related to that number. And then you can present the dot card in any directions.
I use A4 though and my baby seems progressing fine with it.
Be careful with the files downloaded. Though we all intend well, we may have made mistakes. I started out downloading a doc file for red dots 1 to 100. When I counted the dots, I had extra 1 dot for nearly the whole set; so I ended up doing my own ppt red dots file from scratch. I will upload it later on if you are interested. One thing though: my dots do not have a black border around them; only reading about it afterwards (not so important for my baby since she was nearly 1 year when I started teaching her).
The size of the dots really depends on the age of the child. I assume in your case you will want to teach your newborn baby (because you mentioned that you are on maternity leave). If so the size is important. Introducing a newborn baby to quantity for the first 8-10 weeks is not really teaching him/her quantity but stimulating his/her visual pathway. Doman called it the ‘zero step’. He said to use black dots for this time. Posterboard should be 15" x 15" for new born with dots 1 1/2" in diameter or larger if you like. You need very bold black dots on white posterboard to get the appropriate intensity for an infant.
You start with 1 to 7, one dot per day for 10 times. So say Monday is day of one dot card, and you show your baby that one dot card 10 times during the day when he/she is happy. Tuesday is 2 dot card day, and so on. Repeat this process for 3 weeks. Then do the same process for 8 to 14. By the time your baby is 10 weeks, he/she should have a good enough visual pathway to start the so called “1st step” in Doman method.
This is clearly talked in details in Doman’s book How to teach you baby math. It would be a good investment. I bought it from amazon.com.
If you have problem buying the book, please tell then I will see if I can scan the appropriate pages for teaching infant and send to you.
Thanks Hafam for the info on how you approached dot cards. I have how to teach your baby math and how smart is your baby … which is why I was wondering about square cards (11" are too big to fit in my printer, also are not a standard size available in Aust) vs rectangular … and also the size of dots (cannot seem to source red dots 3/4" diameter … only 1/2" or 1")
I have considered bying the set from IAHP but I live in Australia and the cost of postage will be extremely expensive due to the weight … and also the conversion to Aussie dollar is quite steep.
It would be fantastic if you would consider sharing your dot cards with everyone on the forum. I am a little confused - do we need a black border around the red dots or around the card?
You have a 2 week old baby right? You can find instruction on how to teach young infant in the How to teach your baby math page 159. Summary of that section, I have posted in the previous post (point 2). You need 15" square cards, you need BLACK dots 1.5" diameter. However consider you only have to do 14 of them like that (quantity 1 to 14), it would not be too much work. You can buy a ruler with some big circles in it to draw dots and fill the dots with black permanent marker. You don’t need to have dots at exact 1.5", bigger is ok, or even better. Actually you can use a lot of things to draw circles, what about milk bottle caps?
If you want to print, just draw big dots on A4 size, to the size so that 14 dots will fill the space of A4.
Later on you can use my attached files if you like, just that it does not have black border around the dots (which provides extra contrast). and it does not suit your baby right now. Black border is around the dots, the card does not need borders.
In the case you want to make cards manually later on, you can use 1" (bigger than the requirement of 3/4"). The point of the square cards is that so you can show the dot cards to your baby in any direction. I compromised that with convenience and printed my cards on A4.
I could not afford to buy the kit from USA either. Our NZ dollar is worse than your Aussie one.