This is not an advertisement by any means, but I am sold on Your Baby Can Read. I'll tell anybody. It really works when you follow the program consistently. Anna Claire will be 4 in June, and we used the program with her from 6 months to 2 years.
The thing that I think many folks don't understand is that the program doesn't have to take up much extra time. Anna Claire watched the videos at mealtimes, and we read the books and cards with her before nap and bedtime - times when we already had a captive audience.
The other misconception I think people have is that they underestimate babies. People think babies just passively sit there drooling on themselves with nothing going on upstairs. They don't understand the "window of opportunity" open to babies and how their brains are sponges at this point, making many, many connections.
Please know, we are not flash cards-in-your-face-parents, though flash cards are a reinforcing tool you can use with the program. Anna Claire has not had flash cards in her face or watched any of the YBCR videos for over a year now, yet the sight words she is able to recognize seem to double each month.
I think this is due to the foundation Your Baby Can Read provides, but it is also due to reading with her very frequently, and at her request (we read at least 2-3 books on most given days). She loves to read!
Every other week, I take Anna Claire to the library and she and I pick 10-12 high interest books based on her current interests and the current seasons and events happening in her life. I also try to choose at least 1-2 books that I think she can read almost entirely herself. Larry and I also encourage her to read as many words as possible on her own in these books, by not supplying words that we know she knows, or are in word families of words she already knows.
I was looking over the First Grade Dolch Word list yesterday, and thought Anna Claire probably would know a lot of them. So just for the heck of it, I gave her the list.
We only spent 5 minutes on the list, and it's low pressure. I'll say, "Hey Anna Claire, Mommy wants to play a word game with you. Read as many words on this page as you can. If you can read at least 10 of them (knowing she will read more than 10) you'll get a special treat."
I'm convinced she knows more, but I
never push her. When she's done, I'm done. She gets her candy, and I'm a proud Mommy. Win-win!
The circled words are words are words she was able to read. If she
attempted the word and missed, I noted the miscue above the Dolch word.
I love her miscues, like "handsome" for "some" and "difficult" for "could." We're not sure if she thought it was the word "difficult" or that it was hard to read. ;)
Most of her miscues made a whole lot of sense, like "where" for "were," "but" for "put," and "bow" for "how."
I looked at the second and third grade word lists and am thinking she'll know as many of those. The word lists can be found
here.
