What science has achieved since Doman?!

Hi!

I’m a huge fan of Doman’s method AND at the same time huge fan of scientific facts. I would love to follow scientific recommendations on how to stimulate and help my baby to grow. But science seems to be following SO FAR behind and seems to be giving recommendations identified by Doman 40 years ago (“Reading is good for babies”, “Sitting in a sitter is not good for baby’s motor development”, “Babies understand a lot more than we expect”).

Also scientific arguments for or against Doman’s methods seem to focus on only one of his recommendations “patterning”. We are following Doman’s methods but have not been doing any patterning!

I have so many questions about Doman’s methods without answers. What about healthy children? What about our own children we see developing so much faster that their peers and being happier than their peers?

Does anyone else feel there is a cap between what the parents of early learning children know and what has been proven scientifically? :wacko:

Kristiina

I learned about Doman 5 years ago so I am used to the lack of scientific articles :smiley:

Currently I am thinking that Doman says that it is enough to work with his methods only - but he does not say anything about the development of speech and logical thinking. Early talking and logical thinking are considered as the signs of giftedness. Methods of Doman seems tabu in scientific research - but here are another interesting materials on brain development :slight_smile:

I feel absolutely terrible about starting this thread because just reading Glenn Doman has passed away. Maybe thread should be removed?

some brain development materials were mentioned?
what do you suggest?
some books?

re: Frukc’s comnent on speech:

I don’t think Glenn Doman had a specific method for improving speech however I am certain that teaching my daughter to read as an infant has been by far the most effective tool to teach her to speak. She has Down syndrome & like many people with DS she is a visual learner. Reading is a visual way to teach her to speak. Now at age 5 she speaks quite well.

Of course, I am fan of methods of Doman.

I will explain my point. If you teach in Doman-style, with flashcard sessions, and do not do anything else, your child hears some 15 - 200 words per day.

Children definitely need more words
http://forum.brillkids.com/general-discussion-b5/30-000-words-a-day/

In his books, Doman says that children of loving and interacting parents develop faster. But he does not go deep in it. It is possible that parent follows directly to described method, does flashcards sessions only, and nothing else, and than this child can be language-delayed.

Kristina I am sure Doman would have loved to have the scientific proof as much as you do. The thread is still valid and hopefully one that will be added to for years to come! At the moment the scientific evidence is very lacking. :frowning: you will struggle to find much that has been tested scientifically at all.

Frukc, thanks for posting that ``30000 words per day’’ thread. I guess that for language development, we have to continue to input, input, and input via reading aloud. Thanks to Seastar’s thread on reading aloud and the 2,013 book challenge thread by Tamsyn, I’ve upped the amount of reading aloud considerably.

But when I reread that old ``30000 words per day’’ thread you posted, I found that well, I’ve still got some distance to go. 30000 words a day is equated to 18 and a half readings of Cat in the Hat. I got the Cat in the Hat book out, read it and found that well, I’m lacking. For read-alouds, I average about 10 chapters in a chapter book each day. (Each chapter is quite long though. Some chapters, however, are not as long as one reading of Cat in the Hat). On the whole, it takes about 2 hours to complete all 10 chapters. I read aloud mostly from the Yesterday Classics collection. But on reading the thread Frukc pasted above, I found I will have to up it to at least 15-20 chapters if I’m to get close to the 30000 word mark.

And what that paediatrician (Dr Steven Perry) said about focussing on input rather than output echoes what Mandabplus3 says all the time. That was very encouraging to me. I’ll continue to focus on input. Thanks again, Frukc.

Thoughts, anyone?

nee1

Your approach is like this http://homeparents.about.com/od/backtoschool/a/language_2.htm :slight_smile:

For me, there are three whales of EL.

  1. Doman and other authorities (Shichida, Heguru - they are many and strong).
  2. Talking (see 30000 words thread)
  3. Psychological aspects (see http://forum.brillkids.com/coffee-corner/brilliant-kids-lack-confidence-the-perils-of-praise/)

I do not think that children need exactly 30 000 words. Maybe that is in case if no direct teaching is applied. And I know two kids whose mothers are extremely chatty, and these kids are late talkers, below the average, and one is diagnosed as slightly mentally delayed. These kids are so used to useless talking (including countless restrictions) that they just switch off their ears. Such talking is like singing of birds; I am used to bird talking but still do not understand.
If you include some educative content in your language and have some empathy you can talk less, I am sure :slight_smile:

I also do not think that reading aloud is the very best. At least for my kids. The language in books often is dead and unnatural. I retell book stories using my language and adjusting to level of particular kid. For some time, we also used to watch simple cartoons and I explained everything what happened on the screen. Reading aloud is successful after 3.5 years, at least for my kids.

There is also research: reading aloud without interaction and understanding can be ineffective
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/124/1/342.full.pdf+html

====

And now about me. Why I am in this thread. With my second kid I did Doman since birth and I did not talk enough. Mostly I continued to talk with my first kid, and I thought that my second one will learn from this. I also am not a chatty person. And this second child was unplanned; something was not waken up in myself. When he was almost two years old I understood my mistake. My second one was a bit delayed. Now he is approximately one year after my first kid. He is 3.4 years old. Concerning language and logic, he is exactly in the same level where my girl was when she was 2.4 years old.

My second kid is reading since 2.10, he has some basic knowledge in math, he knows much about animals and nature. His ability to read does not influence his language and logic development.

During the last year, sometimes I wake up in the middle in the night with thought “my son will be mentally delayed because of me”. I learned from the experience of Karen Quinn.

Now things go better. His talking and logic are improving. He is very right-brained, consistent, strong-willed and creative. He likes to play alone; that is another reason for language delay because he do not seek interaction all the time as my first kid did.

I continue to concern about his development but am not in panic anymore. He develops one year after my first kid. But my first kid is two years above the average (she is smarter than any other kid I personally know) so being one year after her is OK :slight_smile:

This is the first time I talk about it in this forum. How guilty I feel that I did Doman without anything else.

Hi Frukc!

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on raising siblings. Karma! I bet you are not the only parent having similar thoughts of what they should have done differently. :huh:

I believe that things will even out in long run, so if you just keep giving same focus for both of your kids, your younger kid could soon show more knowledge than you expect. :smiley: I wish you all the best!

Kristiina

Kristiina, please I hope you don’t mind my posting on this thread. Frukc made some observations that I think are worth discussing. Thank you.

Frukc,

Many thanks for your comments. I’ve pondered all you said and here are my thoughts (feel to chime with your thoughts too):

  1. I’ve heard that boys are less talkative in general than girls. I don’t know if this is true since I don’t have daughters yet. But if you look at broad generalisations, you’ll find that men in general don’t talk as much as women. Most men are people of few words, and if not for the women in their lives, most would not talk at all. Most men talk mainly to give information, if you get what I mean. I don’t know, honestly. I don’t know if you should compare your son with your daughter. Men in general are completely different from women - their temperament, their level of talk, etc. Let me know what you think.

  2. I also think you should remember that kids are very different. Kids from the same parents, same upbringing, will still have different strengths. I remember reading ``Native Reading’’ by Timothy Kailing. I’ve posted a link where you can read preview the pages I wanted to highlight - http://www.nativereading.com/introduction.html. You see, Timothy Kailing had 2 kids. The first son, Otto knew his alphabet soon after his first birthday, he started reading at 18 months, and by 2 and a half months, he could read aloud Charlotte’s Web (read the link above for the whole story). Not so with their second child, a daughter named Freya. She started showing an interest in words at 2 and a half. Remember, 2 and a half was the age at which her older brother Otto could read aloud Charlotte’s Web. Soon after, she started reading individual words, and by 3, she was reading fluently too.

Permit me to quote an excerpt about this from Chapter Six of the book. It says:

As in every other ability, there is a great deal of individual variation in how easily children are able to master reading, and when they are most ready to do this. A child who has abundant curiosity about abstract things, and who has an attention span to match, may well pick up reading at the age of three in an environment only moderately rich in correlations between the written and spoken language; simply being in a literate educated home with dedicated parents may be sufficient for such a child. But most children, with different strengths, will not make the connections necessary to become an early reader in even this supportive environment

In contrast the native reading techniques are intentionally based on the natural abilities that essentially all children share. The different strengths and personalities of each child will certainly lead to different individual pathways to reading, but the end result should generally be the same: a deep and fluent understanding of the written word at what most people consider a strikingly young age.

My experience with my own two children shows the truth of this. My son, Otto always had a particular interest in signs and symbols from an early age. For example, as soon as he could grasp objects, he loved to play with his multicolored bathtub letters. Otto knew all the letters of the alphabet soon after his first birthday, and he delighted in this knowledge. He started reading at eighteen months, and for most of his childhood, he read with just about the same level of fluency with which he could speak. Otto quickly progressed until by the age of two, he was fluent enough to read chapter books. By the age of three, he was already a considerably better speller than I am (and I’m not that bad), completely unflustered by silent letters, hard versus soft c’s, ie’s and ei’s and other such difficulties.

In contrast, my second-born child, Freya, was comparatively uninterested in letters and words through her first two-and-a-half years. She was, perhaps more typically, focussed on the pictures in books and generally ignored the text. However, I continued to use my correlational methods with her because the logic behind them was so compelling, So, for example, even though she generally seemed to be ignoring my consistent text pointing when I read books to here, I continued to do it. I was in the habit by this time, after the experience with my son. But I never tried to make Freya look at the words. I simply persisted in my techniques, reasoning that she would take notice when she was ready. Freya, by the way, was always such a stubborn'' or as I like to think, opinionated’’ child, that somehow pushing her to read, or pushing her to do just about anything else she wasn’t enthusiastic about, was seldom a viable option. The moment she felt she was being pushed into anything was the moment she usually determined she was going to have nothing of it! Then, at around two-and-a-half year, Freya, too suddenly started asking me (or more accurately, commanding me) to point to the words - ``Point, Papa, Point!‘’ - on those occasions where I was being momentarily forgetful or lazy and was not already text pointing. The way this happened, quite out of the blue, makes me quite sure that she had actually been taking notice of the words for a long time, at least subconsciously. Within a month or two she was reading individual words on her own, and very quickly, before her third birthday, she too was reading fluently. I suspect that Freya’s very nonlinear trajectory will prove more typical for native reading acquisition; only the experience of many more families will tell for sure.

Please let me know what you think.

I’ll continue here.

  1. Frukc, also remember that we EL parents are well in the minority. Most parents are not even doing most of what we are doing. So I’m sure that whatever mistakes we make in this EL business, there is plenty of time to catch up. So be encouraged, Frukc. You mentioned Karen Quinn. Her son did catch up, if you remember. He went from a 37th percentile IQ score at age 3 to the 94th percentile at age 4. So when people say IQ scores are unchangeable, I say hogwash. In my opinion, if you intervene early, as Karen did, you can influence the scores significantly. I shared Karen’s story of her son’s IQ saga here - http://forum.brillkids.com/general-discussion-b5/‘mindset’-is-a-fabulous-book!-but-it’s-hard-to-live/msg83762/#msg83762

Now, with Karen’s first child and daughter, Schuyler, I think that maybe in Schuyler’s case, Karen did not know then that one could affect IQ by talk ( I posted an excerpt here - http://forum.brillkids.com/general-discussion-b5/article-moms-talk-their-infantstoddlers-into-being-gifted-(my-recap)/msg90005/#msg90005). But you know early, Frukc, and you are talking to your son in his early days. Remember, Karen’s son did ace IQ tests, a test which the doctor told her that scores were unchangeable. He went from the 37th percentile to the 94th percentile. So I’m sure your son will catch up. Please, be encouraged, Frukc.

One last post.

Frukc, you mentioned a mom who was chatty but the kids ended up speech delayed. I’m a bit curious.

a) When she chatted, was she directing the words to her kids? I ask because I read in the Hart and Risley paper (on the 30000 word thread) that the speech that counted towards language development was speech directed to the child. So TV does not count. Could you explain what you saw that you think caused the speech delay? I’m curious why talking to a child could cause speech delay. The mom of Aaron (on the Karen Quinn thead above) was chatty in a very productive way, and her son turned out bright. Do you think your friend’s chatting was more of rambling than productive conversations? Can you explain?

b) Your comment about her placing countless restrictions on the children made me wonder. I read in the Hart and Risley paper here (http://forum.brillkids.com/general-discussion-b5/30-000-words-a-day/msg79356/#msg79356) that:

``But the children’s language experience did not differ just in terms of the number and quality of words heard. We can extrapolate similarly the relative differences the data showed in children’s hourly experience with parent affirmatives (encouraging words) and prohibitions. The average child in a professional family was accumulating 32 affirmatives and five prohibitions per hour, a ratio of 6 encouragements to 1 discouragement. The average child in a working-class family was accumulating 12 affirmatives and seven prohibitions per hour, a ratio of 2 encouragements to 1 discouragement. The average child in a welfare family, though, was accumulating five affirmatives and 11 prohibitions per hour, a ratio of 1 encouragement to 2 discouragements. In a 5,200-hour year, that would be 166,000 encouragements to 26,000 discouragements in a professional family, 62,000 encouragements to 36,000 discouragements in a working-class family, and 26,000 encouragements to 57,000 discouragements in a welfare family.

Extrapolated to the first four years of life, the average child in a professional family would have accumulated 560,000 more instances of encouraging feedback than discouraging feedback, and an average child in a working-class family would have accumulated 100,000 more encouragements than discouragements. But an average child in a welfare family would have accumulated 125,000 more instances of prohibitions than encouragements. By the age of 4, the average child in a welfare family might have had 144,000 fewer encouragements and 84 encouragements and 84,000 more discouragements of his or her behavior than the average child in a working-class family.‘’

Hmmm. Do you think her children heard too many prohibitions and very few encouragements? Could you explain some more, Frukc?

I just want to raise my hand… Chatty mom here with a child that was speech delayed. :slight_smile: So it can happen.
I was a nanny for 10 years before I had my son so I knew all the tricks of talking and conversing with infants- to young children. I was informative, paused for response, did eye contact, etc. I also did sign language.

Now the back story on James was that he was born not breathing and was predicated to be mentally retarded, he was then failure to thrive for the first few years of his life. He was then red flagged for autism and had several speech regressions. He was doing speech therapy, to no real avail. I was teaching his to read on the side. And frankly it was his ability to read that gave him the ability to speak.
We now read a lot. And I believe those words really count. I was constantly explaining what it was when we were reading.
Now at 3.5 he talks quite well. His vocabulary is expansive. And we have some amazing conversations. Many people say he is gifted of genius. But I know him just to be an EL kid.

So what I am trying to say… I think talking does help. But it might take a while to see some results. Or the child might have an underlying issue.

And frankly boys talk later than girls. You can have the rare boy that has advanced speech or girl that is a late talker. I think that there should be different speech milestones for girls and boys. Something I discussed with my sons speech therapist.

thank you both for your kind replays!

nee, you asked me about the two boys.

Well, there are two families. The first one I met 6 years ago for some days and I do not remember details. Than I did not have kids. Mother is talking all the time and her son is diagnosed as slightly mentally delayed. He was 12.

The second family I meet often. Mother in this family is very chatty, she is just talking all the time. But her talking can be sometimes unbearable because she often is including memories about discussions with people nobody else knows, and interrupts others with something what is not connected with the discussion others are having. (I am sorry, L.)

Her son J is now 5 years old. He did not have any diagnosed health problems. In his first year, his both parents stayed at home and both were involved in parenting. Mother had vacation, father studied but did not finish. From 1 year to 3.5 (until childcare), father was stay-at-home father. He is a nice person and nice to kids but his talking might be called un-empathic. He is often using long and foreign words, and logical thinking is not his strong side.

This is a very strange subject, restrictions in this family. I remember some events.
When J was four months old, his parents did not allow to him to chew a towel because “it is coloured so it is chemical” (100 times washed cotton towel).
When he was 8 months old, he was sitting on a chair and swinging his legs, and his mother said him not to do it because it is not politely.
When he was 1 year and 3 months old, we were in countryside, and kids had fun trying to water flowers in a flower bed. For J, this was the first time in such activity. J parents did not allow him just pour water on a footpath and everywhere else and demanded that he pours water only in a flowerbed. When we (I and my husband) said that J should explore first, mother said in an angry voice “we are teaching him”. this “we are teaching him” she said every time in following years when someone tried to say that he should explore and learn by himself.

It was like some instinct - they banned all these activities I consider developing activities. So, also the motor skills of J seemed to be delayed.

I think - if this boy would listen and follow to all these restrictions which often were age-inappropriate, his mental health would be endangered. so it was better not to listen. And even if he would listen, he would not understand because his parents did not talk in his level. They always talked in long and complex sentences. At the same time, they used rather restricted vocabulary. “do not run along a pathway because you can fall down” type sentences; pointless to listen for 3 year old boy.

In article I linked above is a quote I like:

“Parents are most efficient at promot-
ing child language development when
they calibrate their own speech to be
just challenging enough for the child,
neither so simplistic that the child
learns nothing from the parent’s model,
nor so sophisticated that the child is
bewildered. This just-challenging zone
has been termed the “zone of proximal
development.”

This is what was wrong here.

I remember some episodes when J was 2.5 - he definitely did not understand what I was saying. He started to talk when he was three, and the process was slow. Now (5) he still has rather little vocabulary. “I like jeeps better than tractors” is probably the most difficult sentence I have heard from him. When he was 4, he was able to count only to 3 but now he can up to 6. His parents are very satisfied with childcare so they do not do any education at home.

You may feel that I am not positive. This boy used to be aggressive to my daughter. He is aggressive to everyone. When kids (mine and neighbors) want to play, he without learning the game cries “you can not, I will be the first”. And than he looses because he is not able to understand the rules. Neighboring kids (very nice kids) do not come to our yard when they see J.

I think, aggressiveness is a logical result of this type of parenting. His parents do not let him explore, to be himself. And he thinks that it is the only type of communication - restriction and correcting, and no empathy.

I consider myself a strict mum. I know that little kids are capable of understanding more than they are given credit for. I have found after years of working with kids that if I am stricter when they are younger I can then let up with the rules a bit when they are older. This way they feel like they have more freedom, when in reality the good behavior is already ingrained. We then spend less time dealing with defiance, testing limits and restrictions. They then have the chance to explore and do as they wish. I am talking 2-4 years olds here.
And I do say to my son "don’t do that, because ____. We do this ____. I have found that if I don’t explain why and offer alternatives my son will keep doing it. For example if he is yelling loudly in the store I will say. “James please don’t yell, it is hurting other people’s ears and can give them a headache. We use our quiet voice. shhh… softly. Do you want to try speaking In a whisper?” If I had said anything like “please don’t yell.” He would continue to yell. Or he would ask why over and over.

I also have made observations of children in that 2-6 year old range that are just wild and what I have seen is that the children that have no rules and restrictions are the ones that are the more wild and are currently pushing the boundaries more than the children that were raised learning the rules.

Right now my son (3.5) and I are having issues with his behavior at the library. And it is my fault. We have been going to the library for years. I had never enforced library behavior, the quiet voice, no running rules because we have amazing librarians who don’t mind the little ones running and raising their voice and being excited and having a love for the library. For many kids in the winter the library is the only place they can get out and run. So I started letting my son enjoy the open spaces. Now whenever we go to the library he still loves to run up and down the aisle and he is having so much fun that he conveniently won’t listen.
I regret not teaching him right when at 10 months old when he started running. All I had to do back then was encourage him to walk, and to encourage inside voice when he was older and was more vocal. Now I am dealing with unruly…
Little kids can and do often learn rules fast.

Now that all being said… I do think there is a difference from letting a child run in the library or to sit still in church than there is having a child water flowers and play in the garden. I too believe that a child has to explore and be a little scientist and learn about the world around them. But they can learn these wonders in many ways. I would never tolerate my son ripping books at any age, or biting or kicking or smacking. Those are things that I would nip in the bud. And frankly I have never had an issue with any of those.

Thanks. What was wrong in the family described - parents corrected their son all the time - bet they did not distinguish between minor improvable behavior and serious bad behavior. And they just said their correction, but never continued, never tried really stop the wrong action, like carrying their son away from a place of bad behavior. Kid just continued, and nothing followed. They were like a background radio. In result, their child thought that “do not bet your cousin in face with steel rake” is of the same unimportance as “do not run along the path because you can fall down”.

I had to physically defend my child because his parents did nothing except continued talking in prayerful voice. And this boy continued his bad behavior for rather long time. If he disliked something, he did spitting, and he continued it from 1 year to almost 4 years. Once he spit on me and I said to his parents that they should do something or I will put soap in his mouth. And that was the last day he did spitting; his parents stopped it. So, in general, his parents did not do the real correcting and stopped the wrong activity only when others did not bear it anymore, and that was after 3 years of continuous objectively bad behavior. The same was with aggression. From 1 to 4 years he was attacking my girl who is highly sensitive and never beats. There was that accident with steel rake and I started actively correct that child but his parents continued to act like broken radio. It continued for almost a year and than I said to his father just a small part of what I think about his parenting and about his son (you may imagine) - and the bad behavior was stopped in one day, and his aggression towards my daughter never repeated. So their daily correcting was totally useless and unheard and very seldom they did a real correcting.

Well, I will stop about this boy. You may see that I have a problem. Because I am sensitive too, and I do not know how to defend me, and for too long time I did not know how to defend my daughter.

====

Now I want to talk about our EL children.

Well, my son is definitely much brighter than the kid I described above, and always was. Besides my first kid, almost every other kid seems delayed and I can not evaluate properly.

I know a family where first two kids are very intelligent (PhD and entrepreneur) and the third one is different. In a regular family this third son would have simple job like builder, and be happy. In this highly intelligent family (parents are very intelligent too) he tries to reach intellectual jobs but he cannot. His self-confidence is very low. He looks broken. He tries to participate in intelligent discussions but he is able just to take single words from context. He is talking nonsense using long and complex sentences. He has no friends because people of his IQ use another language and are different. Although his parents do not show any dissatisfaction with him. So I think my both kids should be in a similar level, for their self-confidence. They will never be the same because their tempers are very different. But my second one should be above the average, to feel good in his family.

I am often thinking about the connection between logical thinking and talking. And which qualities are depending from the overall development and which do not. This is what I would like to discuss with you :slight_smile:

I have documented the development of my kids.

The first one.
8 months - first 3 words.
1.2 years - explosion of vocabulary.
1 year and 5 months: first dialog with me (4 turns); saying “yes”; understanding consequence “you will get your milk if you will let me to dress you”.
1.6: counting up to 6; distinguishing and commenting calls of common birds;
1.8 - saying “I want bread” instead of “L. wants bread” (in our language it means also adding a proper ending of word).
2.2 - trying to tell a story.
2.3: complex sentences with proper times of verbs etc; compiling a story about events of this day.
4.5: reading; adding up to 20; counting above 100 (it started suddenly).

My second one did exactly the same but one year later. When he was 2.2 his vocabulary suddenly (in one day) expanded from some tens to some hundreds of abbreviated words. When he was 3.3 he started to build complex sentences etc.

The most important thing is that the development of his logical thinking had exactly the same delay. He was 2.5 when he understood “you will get A if you will do B”. There are a lot of other parameters which can describe the development of logical thinking. Throwing ball from one person to another. Making sand cake.

Do you also observe this pairing between thinking and talking?

My son definitely was physically able to talk sentences with questions because he was reading them from this powerpoints. But it took half year for him to start to use such sentences by his own.

What was the same for both kids:
they both learned their phonics when they were 1.10;
colors at 1.8;
they both knew at least 100 sight words when they were between 2 and 2.5.
2 years: understanding numbers up to 3;
3 years: understanding numbers up to 4 (I mean understanding the quantity and not mechanically counting like rhyme).
(I know that some kids are more successful in math but I do not succeed; I demonstrated counting and math them every day but they are where they are)
So, these skills depend on something else than logical thinking.

What is special with my second one:
he is reading since 2.10; he is very creative in his playing (much, much more creative than my girl); he is singing all the day and is already singing better than my 5 years old; he likes to play alone.

Probably it seems weird, to bother about the delay of child who is reading since 2.10. It is about my feelings. And I read the newsletter of Testing Mom and here I see that logical thinking is the only that counts, for the evaluation of how smart is a child. Early reading does not count. And in our case, reading really do not pair with thinking.

I find it very interesting. Do you have opinion?

Frukc,

In Testing Mom’s book ``Testing for Kindergarten’', she lists the 7 abilities children need to test well. So the abilities are seven, and not just one (logical thinking), as you said.

The abilities are:

  • language
  • knowledge/comprehension
  • memory
  • math,
  • thinking
  • visual-spatial
  • fine-motor skills.

Most EL parents are covering these, I think. A child’s ability to read will help the knowledge /comprehension bit. Further, it will help the language part, just as Korrale said it helped her son. Thinking is just one part of the whole mix of 7 abilities.

Can you explain what you mean by logical thinking? At least as it relates to a 2-3 year old?

Frukc, I read this guide sometime ago - www.ncela.gwu.edu/files/rcd/BE017764/Familyreading.pdf

It mentions Sidney Ledson and says the following about him:

``Another guide to early reading appearing in 1975 was Sidney Ledson’s Teach Your Child to Read in 60 Days. Though the title tends to put one off, the book is full of good background information[14] and is written with verve. Ledson is a free-lance writer and artist who was born in London and now lives in Ottawa. A single parent, Ledson undertook to teach his two daughters (ages two and a half and four) to read. His purpose was “to let the children enjoy stories at bedtime; it’s a nice part of childhood” (p. 13). Though he wanted to provide this pleasure for them, he was, after feeding, washing, and bedding the girls, “usually too tired or in too poor a mood to read fairy tales. The next best thing, therefore, was to teach the girls to read their own bedtime stories” (p. 13).

Eight months after their reading lessons began, Eve and Jean read sixty-two books in a two-week period, fifty-six of which they had never seen before. How many parents could find the time to read a similar amount to their children and, incidentally, find the patience to read them The Three Little Pigs exuberantly for the tenth time?" (p. 59)

Ledson, who readily concedes that he had no preparation for teaching, nevertheless reveals himself to be a self-taught teacher of considerable resourcefulness and imagination. Improvising play methods as he went along, he succeeded in teaching both girls 186 words singly or in sentences formed with the same words, so that at the end of sixty days Ledson felt that the girls had learned the essentials of reading and now needed only to increase their vocabulary and continue to practice reading. In the next two years they read 300 books and seemed permanently “hooked” on reading.‘’ QUOTE ENDS.

I’ve highlighted the parts I want to discuss. From the story, Sidney Ledson taught his girls early so that they could read their bedtime stories for themselves. With such a large repository of knowledge, I’m sure those girls could easily ace IQ tests and test out as ``gifted’'. So while Karen Quinn might say that early reading is not measured on IQ tests, that’s true only to a limited extent. Early reading may not be measured directly on the tests, but early reading may help a child acquire the knowledge, the vocabulary, and the comprehension needed to do well on those tests. For example, from Sidney Ledson’s story, his girls read 300 books within the next 2 years. I can imagine the large number of facts and the huge vocabulary they must have generated from such copious reading. Imagine those girls getting tested, say at age 6, alongside their peers who were not reading yet. Do you think their scores would be similar to those of their peers? I doubt.

Thoughts?

Frukc,

I am not sure I completely understand what you mean by logical thinking. Some of the ways that you have described it sounds like responsive language development. Telling a child to do something and them following the directions is responsive language. A child using speech to say something is expressive language. A child can have a language delay (or asymetrical development) in either 1 or both of these. James had an expressive speech delay but never a responsive speech delay. Even as a young child, before the age of 1 I could give him 1 step commands such as telling him to pick up a toy or go to his room. About the time he did turn 1 I could tell him “go to your room and bring back your blanket.”
As far as what I would consider logical thinking it is more about cause and effect or doing something with intent. Or understanding something by observation. I really can’t remember a time when my son didn’t do this. But it might have been well established by about 18 months. I know it was well before he could talk. Mind you he could sign. Way before he could talk he was signing sentences like tree cold, leaves fall down.
He was also able to do many things following a sequence of events or by drawing conclusions. If I started running the bath he would start to try and take off his clothes. He was completely potty trained before 2, again way before he could talk. He was about to match colors and shapes and do simple puzzles way before he could talk also.
He knew how to get himself a cup of water by going and getting a cup, and using the water dispenser. He knew if he ever made a spill that he had to immediately go and grab a cloth to clean it up. If I started making dinner in the kitchen he would grab the cutlery. If we said the word outside or drive he would run and grab his shoes.