What brought you here?

Parenting and Education (Other) General Parenting
1

I’m just curious. By that, I mean, what made you be interested in early learning to begin with? Why were you curious instead of dismissing it like so many others do?

Me? Three things.

In high school I learned of a family that always crushed it at the regional sterling scholar music competition. Their child always won by a landslide and rightfully so. That was when I first realized that being gifted isn’t hereditary.

Second, oddly enough, a guy I dated was very down on the idea of homeschooling and I was adamant that I wanted to do it. It was a hard sale and I really liked him. In our many discussions he finally admitted that he would be supportive of homeschooling if they had nothing to gain academically from attending public school. If they already knew everything they needed to learn academically in Kindergarten before they were kindergarten aged, sure, I guess homeschooling would be okay. At that point I started planning on early education and accelerated schooling for my own kids, as a defense to my desire to homeschool. I just realized this correlation this week. Well, we broke up, but a few years later I married one of his best friends. :slight_smile:

Third, I was researching elimination communication and somebody likened it to teaching your baby to read and I started googling. I found Glenn Doman, the yahoo group, and finally BrillKids.

And I lived happily ever after…

2

Love this post! :biggrin:

I was an early reader. My uncle taught me to read the very “hard” way with spanking and all but I love reading. Reading makes learning a lot easier for me. When my son was born. I wanted to teach him to read but didn’t know how. There was no way I would teach him to read the way I was taught when I was a child.

An early learning community in my country was talking about Doman Dot cards and his method. I started researching and buying Doman books. I tried his methods with my son but my little boy was not into paper cards. So…I started searching again and found Brillkids. lol

3

I was browsing at a bookstore when I saw GD’s how to teach your baby to read book. Bought it and the rest is history.

4

I learnt about Doman very late in a way, which is sad for me. But then I’m happy I did before my oldest turned 6! He is now 4yrs old. Two other kids are younger.
First I read in a homeschooling forum on facebook (PL) about reading Doman style. I got interested, got in touch with sb who knows a lot about Doman and hence found more about early learning, got myself a book about reading and so got started. But at some point making paper flash cards was too much for me (what with doing English too and Encyklopedia) so I searched the Internet for PPS in Doman discussion. And I got here. :slight_smile:

5

Love this idea of a post Tamsyn, I also wonder why some jump and go with the EL idea and some run the other way.

I think I was first exposed to EL about 4 years ago when a friend of mine start using YBCR with her 3 month old. Back then I was interested in what was involved but thought that it was too crazy for me and surely that it wouldn’t work.
But then about a year and a half later when I was pregnant with my first child I saw my friends 18 month old again but now she was actually reading two or three words together. She was loving it and doing it with ease. My mind was changed, from then on I decided I would give it a go and I did.
When my daughter was 11months old I felt like she was about to grow out of YBCR so I started looking on the internet for ideas and thats when I came across Brillkids and Doman.
So glad I did,

:slight_smile:

6

Thanks for the post. It’s exciting to read about how others got here.
My story started when I got pregnant and with my husband decided that he will be bilingual. After my son was born we started to use both languages. And then one of our friends told us that they bought the YBCR for their little one. I didn’t know if it would work or not but I just couldn’t stop thinking about it and also that that would be great if I could teach him to read in my language so he could not only speak but read in two languages. So I decided to give a try. He was 13 months old at that time. And exactly 1 month later he started to recognize the words. I will never forget that moment, and I am happy that my husband was there too. First I just couldn’t believe it! And of course I was searching on line for articles about how to do it, about opinions if I’m doing the right thing here and that’s how I found this website and I couldn’t be happier. I still am and feel very lucky because I 've got the support and help I needed an could never get from anybody else since they think…but you guys know exactly what I’m talking about.
My son is 4 years old, speaks and reads in 2 languages, the English is a lot better though, about 2nd-3rd grade level. I love that he loves reading and how excited he is when I bring home new books from the library( we can’t go together as much anymore since he’s in school all day). We are working on our third language (spanish) and math and started violin a few months ago. We still do Mandala almost every morning and play chess with “No stress Chess” a lot. Since he is in K 3 all day it makes us more difficult to do everything I want to but we do our best and can’t wait for summer when we can do even more like we used to. Sorry for the long post.

7

i was a working mother at the time, so busy at work n don’t feel like i do best for my little one. i started searching for activities that i can do with my six month old to make bonding. lucky me, i came to know about brillkids at the very early stage of it. we enjoy the EL n my 2 year old too is speaking in 2 languages n my 5 yr old is better then grade 2 level

8

I came to this forum 6? 7? Years ago… LM didn’t exist and LR was still in its infancy I think. I had previously taught 2 kids to read by the age three with 2 different methods. Then one day I was at the library and I found the Doman book How Smart Is Your Baby. I was intrigued. I did an Internet search and I came upon Brill Kids. . I read the forums a bit. But I never really followed or posted. At that time a lot of the people were from asian countries (presumably) and the posts were focused around Chinese language. I vaguely remember. The only poster I remember was Lappy and Shen Li maybe.

Fast forward 3 years. I had a son of my own. I couldn’t remember my old account information so I created a new one. I read the forums here and there but never really participated until the last year or so when my son became a reader. I didn’t do too much with strict early learning. I followed the Doman physical program advice, did the lights for the eye, sounds for the ears etc infrequently.
We did sign language. I made dot cards with stickers, made big word cards. But didn’t use them much. I couldn’t afford Little Reader. And I avoided screen time.
I planned to introduce reading earlier, but we hit a snag with speech regression and autistic red flags. So we halted for a little bit to focus on those things.

At almost 3.5 James is a reader, mathematician and rambunctious little boy. We have Little Musician and we love the product.

As for early learning… I was taught to read and do math and things early by my mother. I knew it was Possible. So why not? I did it with all the kids I took care of over the last decade. I had a higher investment with my own son because of birth and early infant issues we were told he had an extremely high chance of mental retardation. I believed in early intervention. He is a normal boy now. Maybe he was destined to be, or maybe it was the early learning… I will never know.

9

About 6 years ago, I wanted to have a baby very badly but my hubby wasn’t too keen, so I just read a lot about the topic of raising children. During that time I first found GD’s “Teach your baby to swim,” then went on to buy “Physically Superb” and “Increase Your Babies Intelligence.” Before I gave birth I imagined myself teaching my baby everything!! But once he was there I realized I knew nothing about raising babies and I found it to be very time consuming and exhausting (also rewarding but that bit I was hoping for from the start.) The hole first year went by and I felt like I didn’t do a thing EL related. (Looking back I wasn’t doing too bad, I think my goals and expectations were just way too high.) Then when my baby turned one, I found BrillKids, bought LR, started reading all you-guys’ posts and things, and finally started to feel like an EL-mommy.

10

Hi

In Indian mythology (Mahabharat), there is a part where the son of one of the protagonist’s son (Abhimanyu) learns things from his father whilst in his mother’s womb. It emphasises that a baby is capable of learning from the moment they are conceived and that they will imbibe all the positive qualities that are taught to them even before being born. I was very fascinated by this idea and did not really know anything about ‘early learning’ in the formal sense, but that idea was what made me pursue with wanting to teach my daughter even before she was born. I used to listen to lots of classical, jazz, flamenco music and lots of indian spiritual tapes, read lots of interesting topics and basically spent time discussing those out loud with my husband. I decided to take it a bit further when my daughter was born, by showing her flashcards, educational apps (Sparkabilities was one of them) that I found online and then I found this amazing blog by ShenLi (figur8) and that brought me to knowing and learning all about brillkids, tweedlewink, rightbraineducationshop, wink to learn etc.

I am so glad that I pursued this path, my daughter loves to learn and both my husband & i love that we can teach her and really there is no limit to learning/knowledge. All my listening to music etc. has paid off, because my daughter absolutely loves music and is very curious about everything.

I continue to learn so much from this forum and have read about so many amazing parents teaching and raising wonderful kids.

11

Great topic, Tamsyn!!! I started EL with YBCR. Tony Robbins sums this up with his statement: We run from pain faster than we run to pleasure. I was a very poor student, academically. The only saving grace for my overall brain health came from extensive dance classes. My family and I didn’t know that at time, but I am super grateful my mother had the resources to provide that for me otherwise … I don’t even want to think about what horrible shape I would be in. Fast-Forward. My oldest was 3 months old (She’s now almost 5) I was at my parents’ house, and I caught the tail end of a YBCR infomercial. Literally just enough to get the website address. I bought it that day with ZERO research/consulting with hubby/talked with no one about it!!! I was over the moon with the concept of the product and could care less if I ended up eating $200 if I was wrong. I was determined to not re-live any pain from academics again!

The product came and her and I got to work. My husband was very supportive and didn’t mind. The product was not very well known yet and people (family) thought it was nuts but were happy to see all the attention I gave my daughter. She read her first word, Baby, out loud at 9 months old. She started talking shortly after that and by 13 months, she could read over 50 cards out loud and could say simple phrases AND sing songs!! Being my first baby, I had no idea that talking and singing at that age wasn’t a common thing. She used to just trip people out!! They would jump when she would speak to them. I think mainly because they weren’t expecting to understand her. Kind of like when you meet someone and you assume they don’t speak your language and all of the sudden, you understand what they are saying. “Wait! Do I speak Spanish? Oh, no, duh, they are speaking English.” Hasn’t happened to me personally but I have seen the reverse happen when my husband spoke Spanish to a man and he grabbed his chest and gasped. Then he interrupted and told my husband he had a ‘flash,’ he thought he had died, and then he laughed so hard he almost fell over. Anyway, back to the story. I very quickly understood that the program wasn’t enough and I was bothered as to why Titzer didn’t have a whole library of DVD’s!! Didn’t he realize how great his own program was and that we need a place to go after we are done with the first 5 DVD’s!!! Then, I found Brillkids. I learned of Glenn Doman from brillkids, and then the real research and dedication began. I came across a great blog by a favorite lady of mine, Tamsyn. I bravely commented on her post and left my number and we have been EL mommy friends and more ever since. Many things brought me here, but my relationship with Tamsyn, brings me here the most!! :laugh:

P.S. Titzer has made more DVDs and I dream of the day when all forces of EL Producers come together and make an ultimate curriculum that can be bought in one giant program and is placed in homes and daycares all around the world!!!

12

great thread! first a question for ashly on the new Titzer DVDs - yes I saw there were the original 5 DVDs and the newer versions - are they really different in the sense that it would make sense to purchase all 10 or just updated versions? The stories here are amazing. I am only at the beginning of the journey and it’s so inspiring to read stories of those who are a few years ahead.

I found this forum by googling Glenn Doman - I heard about him by sheer luck. Another mummy moving here was asking about kindergartens using Glenn Doman methods and I thought “how crazy is this!!”. I thought it’s a total scam. But I was still curious enough to have a look at GD’s books on amazon, there were all these reviews of people who said early reading at worked for them so I got curious. I downloaded all the kindle samples of his books and was really surprised I agreed with so many of his observations and ideas. He was lucky to mention Maria Montessori favourably because thus he won me over ;-). Then I bought the books, read them and was convinced. I started experimenting with physical programme on my then 2 month old (now 4 month old) and the results were amazing, she is so far ahead of where her older sister was physically at the time.

What I really love here is how much everyone cares about their children and their happiness. I always thought EL was too pushy but looking at it further I was convinced that you can do it in a loving fun way and also that I would really let my children down if I didn’t make sure they develop lots of skills. I am really excited to get started with everything and see how things go. I am learning so much here!

13

Don’t have the time to write my story yet ( we are traveling at the moment and taking care of the family member in the hospital :frowning: ) but it is coming, I love to see how different paths brought us all together!

GeniusExperiment, Yccr and Yccd ( your child can read and your child can discover) are very different from your baby can read. They are excellent and really worth the investment.

14

Great question, GeniusExperiment!! The DVD’s are not updated material. The material builds and all of his DVD’s are beyond amazing for teaching. I love so many things about it and I also love so many things about LR. LR is great to really enforce, *everything. And Titzer really lets you get the dishes done guilt free :slight_smile: The DVD’s are 20 mins with minimal parent involvement while LR is in front of a delicate computer and needs someone to work the mouse. If you are looking to cut some corners to save cash (totally understand), then don’t buy your kid anything else!! Lol! Clothes and toys are overrated compared to the joys and freedom of an early reader. LR and the first series 1-5 YBCR kit with parent DVD and parent booklet are incredible, life changing, and family tree altering investments. Good luck!!

15

I discovered this forum late. With my oldest I listened to everyone and didn’t really focus on what she knew. Whenever I worked with her she didn’t really care and everyone told me that the most important thing was too play. “Hothousing” was looked down upon and I thought that intelligence was mostly heredity too. By the time she was 4 I got worried that she didn’t know letters yet and what I was trying wasn’t working. A year later when she was 5 I was thinking of homeschooling and started a kindergarten curriculum with her. I started teaching her to read and the process wasn’t easy. On a homeschooling forum there was a thread on teaching toddlers to read and early learning a few months later and while most talked against it Larry Sanger who used to participate in the forum mentioned his story and him and someone else made a lot of good points that made sense. I was already regretting waiting so long to start teaching reading to my oldest. I didn’t really come here until a while later but I did start working with all my kids on learning from then piecing together mostly free stuff. None of my kids were babies when I started but I did get a lot from coming here and I now work with my kids. If I have another down the road I will do early learning from the start.

16

I remember that thread teachingmykids. Larry took a lot of heat over there at the WTM. One time they even temp banned him, LOL. It’s only logical that the most efficient time to teach reading is during the acclimation of language itself. Why limit language to one modality (auditory)?

What brought me here? In short, Larry. Ha ha. I read his essay on teaching his toddler to read and in it he mentions this site, so I thought I’d come check it out. Then I spent a bunch money here and made a lot of friends. Couldn’t be happier!

17

I love everyone’s stories!

Genius Experiment, I think you’re asking about how they have the old YBCR and new ones on their new site now? The old version has Alenka, Titzer’s daughter, do the introduction. The new one has Graham, one of their successful graduates. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEgQ9VVsC4U) The scripts are almost identical, and while some of the footage is the same, much of it is different too. There is better music and better effects in the new version. They only made the old version available for variety. I would recommend getting a different program over buying the old version too, for the money. MonkiSee is a good option, or Little Reader if you don’t already have it. They all build off of each other.

18

Great question!

I always researched a lot before making some important decisions in my life (for example, choosing a college, etc.). Given this way I see myself and my concerns for high quality, it’s is very strange how late I was introduced to Early Learning.

Anyway, two things I did from the beginning. Since my son was born we were raising him bilingual and when he was 4 months we started to use Baby Signs – ASL. I also used the book Slow and Steady Get me Ready.

By this time I met my mother’s friend and she said to me that her son started reading at age 3, and that since he was 8 months she used to read to him pointing the words. That’s why he learned.

That shocked me a little, and the first thing I thought is that he actually wasn’t reading, but only recognizing words as signs. Anyway, from that day I always read to my son this way, pointing to the words. But I never had any expectation. I thought that a kid start to read at 3 because of this would have a small chance to happen. But I was sure I wouldn’t be doing any harm. And also I changed my mind about this. I realized that I read whole words and this is normal, and so it’s reading. So, I always wanted to find a method to read this way to my son, but I was always postponing this.

When my son was 15 months I started then to google this and then some expressions were introduced to me: “sight words” and “whole language”. In my first language I never heard the concept of sight words. Then, looking specifically for whole language, sight words and babies, I found BrillKids. All in the same day, I was introduced to this site, Shichida, Doman, etc… I even thought at first that they worked here LOL . I read also those BrillKids PDF books all in the same day.

I was amazed and also scared that I let so many time pass until I started to look for this.

That day I talked to my wife and she agreed to EL our kid.

Now we use LR, LM, Little Musician and YBCR. I already used to show him Baby Signing Time. And of course, I always read to him and try to make some fun activities.

Since then I’m here with you all.

19

I was just going to ask this question!
One,
I was home-schooled and new I was going to home school my kids. I was excited about it and thought I’d do things I thought other kids their age were doing. My son Kevin was 13 months when I started. We’d watch Leap Frog video, Brainy Baby and other educational videos as well as play phonics games and go to ABCmouse.com.

Two,
My son was almost 2 and he wasn’t saying a single word. He’d just grunt and point to things. He already had to go to feeding therapy which wasn’t free for us so I looked up what we could do and found early interventions and found out I could get feeding and speech through the government. We live in a state where we don’t pay for sales tax so government funding things are not the best here. I heard from relatives in another state they have EI once a week while we had it once a month if lucky. He started saying words before the EI teacher’s first visit and once he started saying words I could see what he was interested in. He knew the alphabet, colors, letters and shapes. The teacher told me to keep teaching him phonics so he could get the sounds down and I did. A couple week later he knew all the sounds of the letters and was proud to use phonics sounds as his new language. I could get him to phonetically sound out what I wanted him to say but he didn’t speak many real words. The teacher saw that he was just making sounds and told me to stop teaching him phonics. She brought a book that visit and my son looked at it. She wanted him to say what the picture in each book was but my son wanted to show her how he knew the alphabet. She said to me: “He’s not looking at the pictures. He’s looking at the words and the colors.”. I was so proud of him and the teacher could see that and told me: “>:( You know, I would much rather have him interested in the pictures than the words. This is not something we would encourage a two year old to learn.”. I nodded in agreement but I was still happy about my son. I told my husband our two babies were ready to be homeschooled. My husband agreed to spend about $600 on each kid. I asked on homeschooling forums about curriculum’s for babies and toddlers and I got the same response as that teacher. They said to only play with the kids or they’ll get burnt out. They asked me why I’d want to teach my kids things other than to just show off. I said "Gee, thanks for the help :dry: ". I’ve been watching this lady (EI teacher) torture my baby trying to get him to say words that he didn’t want to say and I’m the one doing him harm? I continued on my search and found a preschool curriculum for about $300 and we hurried and bought it. I was going to get the preschool hooked on phonics when I thought about my Lily needing something to learn to. I, like everyone else in the world, saw the YBCR infomercials years ago and thought I’d look that up. I watched the news video of YBCR saying how it doesn’t work and I felt sad that it didn’t work. I thought they meant it was a scam where the babies knew what they were supposed to do and say for the camera. What they were actually saying is that memorizing sight words isn’t reading. I thought about how an adult reads and it’s purely memorizing words. I’m not phonetically sounding out anything. I just know what the word look like. I searched everywhere online and couldn’t find a single person who could say the program doesn’t. I found many people who hated the program but they still couldn’t say it doesn’t work. I gave it a test and rented preschool prep meet the sight words for $1.99. My son learned all the words in a week and I was sold. I had to decide between LR or YBCR. I asked on another homeschool forum which product was best and got the same answers as before except one lady suggested I read Glenn Doman’s book. I got the book at the library and ended up buying YBCR, YBCD, YCCD, LM, LR, a bunch of homeschooling supplies and online subscriptions to learning websites. 3 months later my son knows all the words in the YBCR read videos and the meet sight words. He’s learning more with LR now that I know how to work it :). I don’t know how much Lily knows yet because she’s just starting to say words. But she pointed to “point” and clapped when she saw the word “clap” and touched he nose at the word “nose”. I’m so happy I took time to learn about this stuff. I’m having fun teaching them instead of feeling stressed like I was afraid I would be.

Two weeks ago his EI teacher came back after not seeing her for those 3 months. She saw the Brillkids books and the YBCR books on the shelves in the play room and looked at them like “Oh brother”. :slight_smile: she spent the rest of the time trying to talk me into having Kevin go to her preschool. I told her about how Kevin knew everything they teach in preschool and asked what he could learn. She said he’d learn to share and interact with kids. He has a sister to play with, cousins and kids at Church. I’m not worried about that and don’t want him to pick up the things kids at public school do. She then asked if I was going to homeschool them. I have four relatives who are public school teachers so I know not to talk to them about homeschooling. I just said we might and changed the subject to Montessori schools.

20

This thread is so fun to read!

I read constantly, about anything interesting. So when I got pregnant with my first baby, I worked my way down the “parenting and childcare” shelves at my library. One of the books was Doman’s “How to Teach Your Baby to Read.” I thought it sounded crazy, but so cool. I wanted it to be true, and he had some good arguments (especially about there being no difference between learning spoken language and written language except for amount of exposure), but I wasn’t sure I could really believe it. I ordered the rest of his books on inter-library loan and read them all. I finally decided that if this was really fun and enjoyable for me and baby, there couldn’t be any harm in it, so I would try it. My husband thought that sounded fine; he didn’t really believe it either, but he didn’t mind me trying. And I wanted to see if it would work. So I tried it, and she could select the word or quantity I said from two card choices at 9 months. I was excited! But it was hard to keep it up. I searched online for other information and found this site. Now I have a source of encouragement whenever I need it and loads of resources! My two and a half year old is not reading independently, but she’s close, and we’ve had lots of fun together. Her math, prereading, and speaking skills are way beyond other kids her age in our neighborhood, and I know it’s from the time we’ve put into it. We’re doing the same thing with my nine month old now and loving it.