I have a daughter (now 34 months) who can decode just about anything. I’d like to share my story in order to help others who are interested in teaching their young child to read.
First a little about me. I’m a former 2nd grade teacher who now teaches ESL part-time to international college students. I have Masters in Education, and a Masters in Teaching English as a second language. My husband is a professor of applied linguistics.
When my daugher was 14 months old, one of my husband’s students gave him some pirated DVDs from the “Your Baby Can Read” series. And I thought “what a load of crap”! I hadn’t let my daughter watch any videos/TV during her first year and was/am not a fan of baby Einstein… but YBCR seemed kinda cute, and she seemed to like it, so I let her watch it 3 or 4 times a week. After one month, I bought some “sliding word cards” from the site above, and tested her to see if she’d actually “learned” anything. At that point, she could only recognize that “hi” was “hi”, but more importantly she seemed to understand the concept that the printed word corresponded to a spoken word. It was enough to convince me that there was some merit in Titzer’s theory…
So then I decided to go the library and check out Doman’s “Teach your baby to read”. For about 2.5 months (When she was 16 -18 months did a modified version of Doman’s method. This involved 15-30 seconds of quickly flashing word cards 9 times throughout day. (Doman suggested 5 groups of 5 cards, but I only did 3 groups of 5 cards) After only about a week, it was clear that she was learning – if I held up two cards, and said, “Which one says monkey?” she could point to the correct one. She caught on quickly, and within a few weeks, she could recognize dozens of words by site, and she really seemed to enjoy it. (I would not have continued, otherwise) Using this method, I was introducing 3 new words each day – not a lot, but that’s 90 words per month-- so over the course of my 2.5 months, she learned over 200 words. I basically chose the words based on what she was interested in, and went through thematic groups – foods, parts of the body, family members, action words, etc.
In the middle of this, after I had been doing the word cars for one month, I found starfall.com, and I started doing the ABC part with her on my lap. She learned the entire alphabet, upper and lower case (and the sounds they make) in about a month. I believe learning the letters and sounds really complemented and enhanced the whole-word approach.
After I had done the word cards for 2.5 months, i felt we were done with Doman’s stage one - that a ‘critical mass’ had been reached, so I stopped doing the word cards. She was also 18 months old and starting to move from speaking only one word at a time to putting two words together. I started to do word couplets, as Doman suggests, but it didn’t really feel all that “fun”… and I realized that there are so many more large print books and resouces available for small children than were available when Doman’s book was written. So I started pointing to words as we read, at first only in books with large print, and then with everything. At first it was a little weird to do this, but then she started following along. I used a book called “Best books for babies and toddlers” by Odean to help me find good books to read, and we checked out about 30 books at a time from the library. I also made a few books with our family photos and large print captions. We continued to do the ABC’s on starfall, but we also moved onto the “Learn to Read” section which emphasizes blending sounds and phonics.
By the time she turned 2, she could recognize hundreds and hundreds of words by sight, read simple books by herself (even when she’s never seen them before), and could figure out short words she’s never seen before. – please also note that I hardly spent any money to get these amazing results!
During the past year, I haven’t been “teaching” her to read – rather we’ve just been reading. Lots and lots of books, based on her interests. Either I read while tracking the words with my finger, or sometimes I read a page and she reads a page if she’s in the mood. I scour the world for books that will interest her. She’s building fluency and her knowledge of the world – it has been and continues to be a fun journey for our family. But it’s not something the rest of the word can exactly relate to – I didn’t find this or any similar forum until now, so I’m excited about connecting to others who may have similar experiences.
