I am from Germany and have a 2,5 year old son. I came across the whole Baby-Reading topic about 1,5 years ago. I found it fascinating, read Doman’s book and also Larry Sanger’s essay about Baby Reading.
I started making flash cards, powerpoints, different flash cards with pictures on the back but a problem has always been consistency. My husband and I both work and our son is in a daycare during the day. We read to him a lot during bed time and also during the day when we are home. He doesn’t watch TV and only about 4 months ago I started showing him YBCR DVDs.
I likes them and can read “kick”, “tongue”, “nose” etc… He can also read his name and can recognize some letters like O, M, P.
I tried out LR and decided to buy it.
However, we don’t speak English in our home generally - only when talking to friends in the US on the phone or on skype but not regularly.
I would love to hear experiences from other users whose native tongue is NOT English and who use LR to teach their children to read in English. Does it work, what are the experiences ? I can see that my son has no problem reading the parts of the body and I do translate for him “touch your xxx” or “point to xxx” or “where is your xxx”.
I want to make lessons in LR in German but time is always a problem with the jobs and I did buy LR to save me time of making new flash cards etc. all the time.
I would love to hear experiences of non-native English speakers teaching their children to read - did you first teach reading in your own language or did you try LR ?
We use LR and it worked out great for us. You do not need to translate! Just show him what to do and he will soon understand what to do. I have never translated anything for my daughter but we started when she was much younger.
Make it a fun lesson, pause the lessons and show him what to do, run around a room if you wan to. The more fun and relaxed you do the lessons the more he will pick up.
You can search the forum or watch some videos posted in video gallery to see other parents and children using the program.
I do not teach my daughter to read in our native language yet.
I teach a little 2,5y old girl English using LR and she loves the lessons, say the words correctly with great pronunciation. She is doing great.
early learning17 has translated all the German categories, it will take you some time to download them all (one-for-one) and then build a course, but it will take less time than to translate all of them.
My boy is almost the same age as yours, we speak Afrikaans at home, I started him with BK English (UK) when he turned 1 year old. He picked up a lot of English from the program and sometimes it looks like he can read very well, but almost always refuses to read when I ask him to, so I can’t really say much about his reading skills.
When I run an English lesson (or read him an English book) I do all the talking in English, without saying a single Afrikaans word, then when reading Afrikaans, its all Afrikaans. But when we do our Chinese lessons (which I know nothing) I act things out, act silly, use lots of body language and sign language, but only try and say the Chinese that I hear from the lesson as best as I can pronounce it, no English or Afrikaans. It’s not a rule or anything, just a good idea to keep the languages separate.
I’m Italian and I live in Italy with my 2 boys, now almost 4 and 2 years old. I’ve started to teach them to read in Italian using Doman method about 2 months ago but it was probably too late.
The big one can now read word, but phonically. That’s good. He can also write simple words. It seems to me that he’s clearly left brained (He already knew letter sounds when we started)
The little one doesn’t show any interest, but as soon as we started his speaking skills skyrocked! How wonderful! He’s not reading, but speaking well now.
Since they were little they have been exposed to English. They sing English songs and enjoy listening to simple English stories.
I am so overwhelmed by the large amount of reading resourses in English. Reading bear sounds great for the older one and Little reader for the younger. I’m so sorry I can’t find what I’m looking for in our first language! (And flashcards are not working for us…)
Italian phonics is so simple: one letter corresponds to one sounds. (with exceptions, of course) English is so complicated, expecially for the vowel sounds!
Should they learn to read in Italian first, and then English?
Do both at the same time and trust in their brain’s ability to create two different sets of phonics rules?
Just go for English?
According to IAHP web site, the reading program is aimed for children from birth to six. If I remember correctly, there is some age limitation related to Doman Math because according to IAHP the capability to learn using your right side of the brain without concision thinking (left side brain) was lost somewhere between ages 3 and 4. So there shouldn’t be any reason why Doman reading wouldn’t apply to children which are 2 or 4 and your younger child should still be in the phases where the babies learn even faster.
Regarding your other questions, I am not certain what is the optimum way. We are studying two languages (Chinese and English) since age of two months at the same time with our babies native language. I think it is important to provide encyclopedic vocabulary (animals, plants, countries,…) in child’s native language because language is the key aspect of a culture and child’s thinking language should be the mother language. This is just my opinion :D. Opposite to other persons in this thread, I am actually translating LR words to baby’s native language as we use the software. This is because LR contains a lot of words we wouldn’t use otherwise in our everyday life (like otter, cabinet, kite,…), so I want to give native words for those too. Babies learning several languages at the same time should be able to differentiate languages easily of each others. They seem to start using the easiest words of each language first and then end up using only one language at a time. There are several threads of this.
