Thanks for the encouragement CVMomma! It’s nice to know someone is reading the updates 
We are having a lot of fun with letters and words right now. Its great to hear from someone with a LO close to the same age as mine. I will give reading bear a try with her this week to see if she takes to it. If not I’ll try again in a couple of weeks. I’ll give more updates as she makes more progress. Also, I recently found a short leapfrog video on YouTube with a letter sounds song that she loves as well.
Please keep up the updates! My boy is seven months and we started ybcl not too long ago. I have no feedback from him at this point, so stories like yours keep me motivated. I was looking at the leapfrog letter phonics just the other day - putting them on the Xmas wish list!
Hi Evelyn2108! Definitely stick with YBCR I started showing it to my daughter when she was 9(?) months old, I think. I only showed her the starter DVD for less than a month, and she was following along doing the actions very quickly. I stopped showing it to her because I wanted to focus on Spanish, but I reintroduced it not too long ago. She’s moving through the discs quicker at this age so we are actually getting ready to start disc 3 soon. She knows the actions and signs (thanks to us signing with her at home and of course Signing Time/Baby Signing Time) to so many of the words. It’s hard to gauge how many words she’s actually reading from the YBCR DVDs so far. I do also reinforce at other times during the day when we have time by writing words on her magna doodle. We don’t use physical flash cards too much right now because she’s teething and wanting to put hem in her mouth.
The leapfrog phonics toy is wonderful!
Wow, that is so great that she is following along with the actions. My little guy stares intently at the screen, but just chews on his hand whole time. :laugh: that’s just his style though, he’s like that in music class as well, just stares at the teacher playing guitar, stated at the other babies.
I’ve heard from some parents that their kids learned to read mostly just from the signing time dvds. Do yours have the printed word shown along with the sign?
I’ve been signing with my boy for a few months now, but I bought a CD with some songs that I use. Now I’ve heard so many great things about those dvds, I’m thinking of adding them as well.
Congrats again on all the progress!
He’s taking everything in! That’s wonderful! Trust that he is learning It’s great that you’re teaching him sign language too!
Yes; the printed word is shown while Rachel signs the word on the DVDs. My daughter signed several words before she turned 1, but she had a signing vocabulary explosion after her first birthday. I would learn a bunch of signs at night and teach them to her the next day by incorporating them in our play and playing a signing time DVD that covered some of those words. She just turned 15 months, and she signs around 100 words now, including feelings, animals, action words, etc. I highly recommend both Baby Signing Time and Signing Time. I can’t recommend them enough!
Also, I sign as many words as I can while watching YBCR and Kidstart Spanish with her.
Update! This one is long since it’s been a few months since I last updated!!
My baby girl is now 18 months. She learned the rest of the letter sounds and letters by name at 14-15 months, and the rest of the preschool prep sight words around the same time and right after from the DVDs by watching them just a few times. I realized this because she suddenly decided that she wanted to play with the flashcards, and she read each of the words out loud while signing the ones she knew the signs for like “you, I, play, up, word…” And now I keep them out…when she passes them, she picks up a couple, reads them, and continues with whatever she was doing.
Since then I have been writing words on her magna doodle of things she’s interested in such as bee, water, etc., and she has been retaining the info. She remembers even two weeks later after showing her only a few times.
Up until a few weeks ago, she wouldn’t read any of the words she knows when found in a sentence. She would only read them while alone whether it be on a flashcard, on the computer in different fonts, on the magna doodle, or handwritten on paper. She would always concentrate on the letters and say them by name or make the letter sound. Then suddenly, she was looking at a box that said “THIS SIDE UP”, and she read up! I was so excited that I took out some of the preschool prep easy readers. Keep in mind that she had never read a word with upper case letters until then. She looked at the book called “We Play”, and I pointed at we and then play and she read the title! She’s still not keen on reading words in sentences, which is totally fine. She will read them when she’s ready. I know she can do it now though!
She plays the apps called Endless Alphabet and Endless Reader. She loooves these apps! She played them every time we got out the iPad up until recently, and she is able to do them with ease. It’s so much fun watching her absorb all of this information. I love that Endless Alphabet defines the word and uses it in a sentence. I think this is great for her vocabulary.
I need to be more consistent with reading bear, as she really enjoys repeating the words, and she would learn so much from it. It’s such a great program!
As for math, she’s known her numbers up to 10 for several months but she has started counting now. She will start counting from whatever number I call out. So if I say 3, she’ll say the next number all the way up to 10. She counts as she goes up/down steps, she counts cereal, toys, Etc. She now says some of the teen numbers as well. I’m not 100% sure that she understands one to one correspondence yet. I’m not pushing her at all, just observing and starting to do more activities that will encourage that understanding. I’m sure she’ll show me soon
She also found a little basket I had with coins, so I washed them and now I showed her the names of the different coins. She identifies and says penny and nickel. Something interesting: when she picked up the nickel, she put five fingers up and said five. Neither my husband nor I taught her that a nickel is five. I wonder if she read it on the coin or picked it up somewhere along the way…hmmm…
I just have to share that today my LO decided she wanted to help me read a book that we just checked out of the library…it was a short Power Phonics book with one sentence on one side and a picture on the other. She excitedly read the words she knew as I read the book running my finger along the bottom of each word. So exciting!!!
:happy: My LO is continuing to progress in reading…she helps me read some short books. She’s much more eager to read when it’s a book that she finds interesting. She loves books about animals, and she’s loving the Mathstart books as well. I read most of the words while I run my finger under the words, and she sight reads (quite excitedly at times) the words that she knows. It’s still a work in progress of course, but the journey is so fun! I love that she loves books so much! And math too! I’m really going to try to be more consistent with reading bear…it seems that there aren’t enough hours in a day to fit everything in.
Any updates from anyone on reading progress?
ELEducation,
I’m so glad I found this thread again.
It was so wonderful reading through all your updates, especially since your little one is just a few months ahead of mine. It’s funny that you mention preschool prep, I was just copying the dvd’s to my laptop.
My little guy is now 16months. Our biggest challenge right now is that there are still many sounds that he can’t say. I suspect he knows all his letters, but he can’t make the sounds for - c, f, g, j, k, q, s, x, z. Also, when he reads he doesn’t enunciate the whole word, and he doesn’t say multiple syllables. So his “ball” and his “block” sound really similar.
We’ve been using primarily little reader and reading bear. He’s got well over 100 words in his vocab now, but as I mention above, it’s hard to know what’s really going on! :biggrin:
It’s so cute, when we go for walks outside he is always running up to signs, pointing out words, letters, numbers. He loves it.
I’m hoping to have some more success with the preschool prep programs. We will start with sight words. We’ve used the numbers dvd and he LOVED it, he knows his numbers very well (although he only says 1, 2, 3, 9, 10) :biggrin:
Please keep up the updates ELEducation! I bet your kiddo is reading up a storm by now!
Hi Evelyn2108,
It sounds like your little guy is coming along quite well 
How wonderful that he has so many words in his day to day vocabulary! I bet he does know the sounds and just has trouble vocalizing them. You don’t have to wait for him to learn the sounds before you move on to the sight words. You will be surprised at how quickly he learns them! Try the apps too! They’re great for reinforcing if your child prefers using the iPad instead of flashcards. Or use both lol
Are you doing Little Reader and Reading Bear regularly? I started a new thread with an update and some questions in the teach your child to read section. My daughter is 24 months now and is oh so close to taking off with her reading/decoding!
It’s great that he knows his numerals too. Have you introduced quantities? A good idea for this is to print out large numerals and place circle stickers/dots on them representing that number, so the numeral 1 will have one dot on it, the numeral 2 will have two dots, etc. Another idea is to show him one dot when the numeral 1 pops up on the screen, two dots when 2 comes on, and so on.
Keep the updates coming as well I love to hear all of the different perspectives, ideas, adventures, and early learning progress.
EL Education,
I was very surprised how quickly he learned the PP sight words. It is kind of amazing actually.
We’ve been doing little reader on a very regular basis since January. For reading bear for a long time we were only doing the first ten or so presentations in flashcard mode, because he didn’t have the patience for the longer videos. Just recently though he has started showing interest, so now we are going through it in “sound it out slowly” mode. He has finally started saying the “s” sound, but doesn’t it really rarely, I need to encourage it more. The only couplet he says is “mommy please” lol but I suspect if I taught him with personal made little reader sessions he would progress very quickly. I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
How often do you show a reading bear presentation before moving on? For PP I was showing them 3 times. For reading bear I was thinking of doing the same…
We do little math, I have some laminated cards on the wall that show the numeral written, the actual numeral and the quantity in dots. He loves running up to them and slapping them and waiting for me to shout out the number. Or we will reverse rolls and I’ll call out a number and he has to find it. I’m planning on teaching him math with the mortensen method, and will introduce counting with the blocks soon. We do counting on the abacus, with food, etc…
It certainly is a fun journey!
It’s so much fun when they get into the math and reading games, isn’t it? I just knew he would learn the PP Sight Words DVDs quickly! It’s such a great series. Have you shown him the Blends and Diagraphs DVDs yet? Those are great too. Did you do Meet the Numbers with him?
For ReadingBear, I showed most of the vowels 2-3x, and the review one time. Beyond the vowels, I am showing presentations only 1-2x, depending on her interest, but I can’t show the same presentation 2 days in a row because she gets bored if I do this. She loves Reading Bear, but she wants a new presentation each day. So, if I repeat, it has to be separated by at least a couple of days. Right now, we are at the review for the second “unit.” We usually go through one full presentation each day, sometimes only a couple of sections from a lesson and not always in the same sitting.
We go through the presentations on “sound it out quickly” now, as the “sound it out slowly” was becoming boring for her. I thought she was tiring of Reading Bear, but she would say “mas” (more in Spanish) every time a presentation ended. Once I changed it to “sound it out quickly” I saw progress again, and I saw the excitement come back. Amazing how such a minor thing can make such a major difference.
When she reads, she doesn’t sound words out, she just reads them. If it’s a new word, she pauses for a moment and then says it. I wonder if she’s sounding it out in her head or if she remembers reading it before. She’s not reading books cover to cover yet (except for the Priddy books or similar books with one word per page), at least not out loud, but she does love to help me read books, and we read a LOT of books! lol
As for math, we just started Little Math. I’ve had it for awhile but was never consistent and never got past lesson 10. This wasn’t due to lack of interest on her part, it was just that we were doing other things for math. She loves LM though. She counts all day and likes to watch counting videos on youtube, even boring ones that are just of a person counting on a hundreds board. She counts pretty much everything she sees: puzzle pieces, books, etc. We purchased the RightStart curriculum but haven’t yet started. I’m also very interested in Mortensen Math. I’m hoping to buy the blocks second hand or on sale. I wonder if the Math U See blocks would be suitable. I found some locally that are fairly inexpensive. We also use ideas from Marshmallow Math. I’m going to be purchasing large dice soon to play games with. I also saw the Learning Resources Math Mat Challenge that I think she’ll like. She likes variety and can get tired of seeing the same thing repeatedly, so having lots of resources, for us, is important.
I will keep posting updates, and I hope anyone who is reading this will too!
New update! My 25 month old read a preschool prep book cover to cover by herself with me just running my finger under the words until the last two pages when she insisted on running her fingers under the words HERSELF while she read out loud! She was so pleased with herself
She loves to be read to in English and Spanish, and she loves to read together! We spend a significant portion of the day reading at her request including everything from non fiction books about our solar system to mathstart books to fun picture books. She likes to read independently as well, but prior to this she didn’t usually read cover to cover.
This latest milestone came on the heels of her bringing a picture book to a waiting room a couple of weeks ago and deciding to read about half of a picture book out loud to everyone in the waiting room!
It’s incredible what childrens’ minds are capable of!
This past month (October), my daughter has also started spelling some two letter words and some cvc words with her fridge magnets on her own. She surprised us while we were in the kitchen talking, and she started spelling words and saying them!