When did it first occur to you?
I remember being about 5 years old, I was on the front porch, doing Hooked On Phonics, thinking how bored I was and how I wished I’d learned to read as a baby at the same time that I learned to talk so that the work would just be easy. When my baby brother was born, I tried to convince my parents to teach him how to read as a baby so he wouldn’t be bored with school as he got older and then he could just know. They brushed me off and told me it couldn’t be done but for some reason or another, I NEVER believed them. I have 7 younger siblings and 4 young cousins, all of whom I proposed at least 2 or 3 times that we teach them how to read and or do basic math as infants. I have 2 sets brothers and cousins who are the same age. (5 yo brother. 5yo cousin. 7 yo brother. 7yo cousin)
When they were born within months of each other I remember calling my cousins mothers on the phone and telling them about my plan, I had 2 different methods of teaching a baby to read and would mail them the instructions for one of them if they wanted and I would use the other method, and we could compare notes every week to see which way was working better and if we needed to, we could switch up the methods at 1 year old.
I remember I was about 13 and 15 during those times but no one ever took me seriously and my mom never allowed me to experiment on my younger siblings. lol.
I felt SO vindicated (And a little jealous!) when I saw the commercials for YBCR a few years ago, because I’d planned to design and patent my own method for this “miracle method” when I was 19 to pay for college. Lol.
Anyway, so I guess you can say I have been a believe almost all my life, but sadly I’ve yet to have any children of my own but I greatly look forward to educating my children from birth.
As a child, I always wanted to understand arithmetic and speak Spanish, as I struggled SO MUCH with arithmetic and I really wanted to learn Spanish but my mom wouldn’t teach me. My siblings were so good with Math in general and even though I was a grade ahead, I never really UNDERSTOOD what was happening, and was always confused in math. I vowed that I’d teach my babies how to do it so that they’d understand, because I never did.
I remember having the epiphany that sometimes you “understand” a thing without any effort because I spoke very good, grammatically correct English all my life and could intuit the meaning of almost any word from context clues, but I never really understand my grammar lessons as a child. I used to wish that I could understand math the same way that I did English, even if I wasn’t very good with grammar terminology.
I really got into researching infant education when I taught my 6yo brother how to read this past summer in 10 weeks. I taught him so that he’d know how to read in 1st grade. He was reading very well at the beginning of 1st grade, but because he doesn’t practice daily his reading has gone down and now I’m working to improve his reading and my 3rd grade sister needs remedial reading lessons (she reads worse than the 6yo) and all the drama we go through trying to get them to read has inspired me to by pass all this crap and just do infant education…