Saturday, November 7, 2009

Baby Educational Toys?

I don't spend much time thinking about the toys my son plays with, although we do go to Toys R Us occasionally and see a slew of baby educational toys. He has a toy laptop, which has taught him, pretty much, how to slide the cartridges in and out! We choose pretty basic or "classic" toys, and he seems to enjoy them. I never thought much about toys as educational objects. Meaning, I have never tested him to see if a particular toy has helped teach him a concept. Maybe I should think about that. I assumed when he got a bit older he would get into Legos, puzzles, or games but as of right now, I don't really direct his toy play at all.

Friday, November 6, 2009

DVD Selection Video



Part 2

Book Selection Video

Email from Intellectual Baby

Some people are so closed minded to teaching babies to read. I just don't get it. When I learned this stuff I completely
embraced it because I already had children and saw what they were capable of learning. This was just a natural next step to take. How can people be so closed minded to teaching kids and giving them a strong start in life?


I just had to post this because I could sense the frustration in this email. She has dedicated part of her life to her children's advancement, and wants to see others do the same. I got into a flame war a while back on a forum that was totally unrelated to parenting, but a had a subforum for Parenthood. A poster asked about the Your Baby Can Read Program, and there was completely uniform dissent from every poster except me. People are closed-minded for several reasons. I will list them here.

1) The phonics vs. sight words debate. Many educators are against the use of sight words and are for the exclusive use of phonics for reading education. Because they are only familiar developmentally with 6 year olds, they apply this anti-sight reading stance to babies as well.
2) People do not want their children to be particularly advanced or smart, because they remember not liking their smart peers in school.
3) They worry about their children fitting in socially more than they worry about their literacy.
4) They do not believe that babies can really learn to read.
5) Alternatively, they believe if babies can learn to read it is a useless skill for a baby to have.
6) They believe "just reading" to your child is the only appropriate exposure of a child to the printed word.
7) There are very very annoying parents out there that show off their babies skills in a very condescending way to other parents, and there is nothing worse than being "that parent."
8) And finally, they believe that they learned to read at an early age from a parent who just read to them. Or know a story about some one who did.
9) Some one told them that all children read at a 3rd grade level in the 3rd grade and they don't use their common sense to determine whether that could possibly even be true.
10) They don't like to read much themselves.

I know it's been work for her to market her product, but the community of Americans who would want their child to know anything beyond the ABC song going to kindergarten is very small.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

From Glenn Doman's Website

In order for a baby to read words, there are three requirements. The print must be large, clear, and repeated. The baby's immature visual pathways are not able to deal with small print. Indeed, it is the very process of showing the baby large words which physically grow and mature his brain's visual pathway.

I picked up this quote from Glenn Doman's website. I have come to accept this as pretty much the gospel truth. Please read and re-read this quote.

To break this down, there are 3 requirements. The print must be:

1) LARGE
2) CLEAR
3) REPEATED

The Your Baby Can Read System provides videos and products which meets these requirements well. However, in making this transition to reading mainstream children books, I have found that very very few books meet these three requirements, and further the ones that do meet these requirements seem to have done so on accident.

Great Interview with Janet Doman

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114247630

I am sorry for her that she got so flustered at the other interviewee. He threw up a bunch of red herring type accusations such as "Show me studies" and "You charge $5000" which made her defensive. I could not tell what type of study that he was suggesting. It seemed like he was suggesting that babies can't learn to read, but then later said that the true test is outcomes at age 15. Well, I can say for 100% certain without any study that every baby who reads will also read at age 15. They may or may not read better than some of their peers, but they absolutely not suffer the fate of many of their peers who never learn to read. The truth is, he cannot show a single study which will show that early reading is detrimental or makes no difference in the ultimate literacy level of a child. The population of babies who read will have a 100% literacy rate, while the population of babies who did not read will have an alarming amount of illiteracy and functional illiteracy. So, there's your "study." And the notion that babies can't learn at this point is laughable in the face of the proliferation video after video on youtube and elsewhere that reveals the truth pretty clearly. The entire country of Singapore is on the Your Baby Can Read bandwagon, I would love to see "studies" on these children. One thing is true, there is a dearth of legitimate study on how babies learn.

Why does Baby Sign Language get a "pass?"
My question is why does teaching hearing babies sign language get a "pass" from the powers that be. He admitted at the end there that babies can learn visual and auditory language cues, I think he stumbled a bit because he realized he was repeating the exact thing that Janet said earlier in the interview, basically that babies are primed for language acquisition through all pathways, including visual. Mothers who teach their babies sign language are universally applauded, but parents who teach their babies to read are frowned upon unless they can somehow claim that it happened through some organic non-deliberate unplanned process which occurred while they were "just reading" to their babies.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Eye Popping Blog

Ordinarily, I would not post about coming across an interesting blog, but I have to share this one with all of you because I probably spent over 2 hours scouring the posts yesterday.

http://www.whyboysfail.com/

As the mother of a son, this blog gives the sociological and statistical backing to my observations of older boys and men around me. I am glad to know that I am right to worry, and that I am right to take action as well. Additionally, in my previous post I detailed the hurdle I have encountered simply finding appropriate books for my child. Part of it is because he is a baby, but in previewing what is available for him in the future, the pickings are rather slim in this category. I actually hope he matures past this level quickly so he can get to the "good stuff" earlier and can keep an enjoyment for reading intact.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Book Selection

So, for the past few weeks I have been somewhat on a mission to find books that my child could use as a beginning reader. It has been much more difficult than I anticipated. I have run into 5 problems consistently and have ended up having to compromise and focus on just getting past this first "emerging reader" stage.

1) The print is too small. Furthermore, often the print is extremely small compared to the size of the picture, drawing the child's eyes towards the picture. Sometimes the print is printed in a bizarre font or printed over the picture.

2) The storyline is inappropriate.

3) The book doesn't show any diversity in the characters. To put it bluntly, I would like to see images of different shades of children playing together.

4) The books seem to focus quite a bit on animals, which I know is interesting and exciting to most children. However, I would like to see some readers with human heroes, particularly human boy heroes. I do not agree with the excessive personification of animals in children's books. It is perfectly fine occasionally but it's a dominant theme in most books and this annoys me quite a bit.

5) The books have no rhythm, rhyme, or "cadence" that would draw a child in. This is why we enjoy golden books and Dr. Suess, but most of these books are way above his head at this point. I hope to have him reading these books by age 2 though.

So far, I have found one line of books that may work alright, the Bobbsey Twins Pre-Level series. It doesn't have problem 1,2, or 4, but problem 3 and 5 are still there. The print is oversized and there are few words on the page, the story, if you could call it that, is very very simple. The pictures are understated, and it is pretty easy for me to get my child to focus his attention on the words. I do not know if the words are large or bold enough though, I am hoping he will grow into it at some point.

Also, one of the board books I received from Kindermusik curriculum has large bold print. It is called "Hickory Dickory Tickle and Bounce" and it is based on the nursery rhyme. Purchasing books off of Amazon, often you cannot look inside to examine the print type, so I have been going to several bookstores to look, and I have found that find large or bold print is actually hard.

TJ has not been too interested in reading books with me lately, he always seems to be busy with his toys. He occupied himself for about an hour last night climbing in and out of the rocker, going to play the ABC song on one of his toys, and returning to the rocker. He can actually follow along with the ABC song now, of course some of it is babble but I would say he "knows" the song after playing it around 30 times last night. He was in a silly mood, spending most of his time crawling and burying his face in the carpet, and being creative with his toys. He pretended his shape sorter bucket was a bowl of food, the the shape blocks were food, and he had an "Mmm-mmm" good meal too.

Oh, and that brings me to an update on his eating habits. After a few bouts with major stomach problems, the doctor has recommended a nutrition plan. We have been following it strictly, excluding junk food (white flour, sugar, and dairy), from his diet and I promise you he is a new person. He sleeps better, eats larger meals, is never constipated, and just has a better attitude about food in general. He often goes over to his high chair and tries to get in because he wants a snack, and he will gobble up almost whatever I put in front of him. If he refuses it, it only takes me about one guess to present him with something acceptable to him. I am glad that our doctor gave us better nutrition guidelines to follow, as I have only found a lot of contradictory information about what toddlers need, and it's fairly obvious to me at this point that his needs were not being met by our previous diet.