What brought you here?

[PokerDad]

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!

[Tamsyn]

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. ( <a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/kEgQ9VVsC4U&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/kEgQ9VVsC4U&rel=1</a>) 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.

[mario]

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.

[FLKL]

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  ". 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". 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.

[Wolfwind]

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.

[Rachel NZ]

A year and a three quarters ago my sister (kiwimum) got YBCR and put her little baby in front of it.

I remember thinking how creepy it was that she was so absorbed in the DVD. But wow, imagine if she could take in just a tiny fraction of what she was watching, that would be amazing!

Then she discovered baby sign.
I spent a lot of time at her house, helping to introduce and remember new signs, reading books to Chloe and putting labels on everything with masking tape. input input input.
I think it was about a year ago that we discovered LR and this amazing forum.

...then we got pregnant
I scour the forum and the EL facebook group links almost daily.
I purchased LR, LM and LMs at 4 months.
Read "how smart is your baby" again at 6 months.
Last week I finally let myself start making black and white infant stimulation cards and some flashcards (action words, common animals, colours, family members)
This week i'll try and gather together the materials for a crawling track...
I've got a box of YBCR material and a bunch of EL-graffitied childrens books coming from my sister.

Two months till he's due to arrive.
Cant wait to meet him and start our EL journey... I wonder what will happen next!

[NPLight]

Thank you Tamsyn for this post!
When my twins were  11-12 months old I was quite worried about their development. Something had to be "special" in either one or the other. She was so advanced in comparison. If she was "normal" then maybe he had some problem, and if he was "normal", then she was very advanced. So I googled a lot on baby development stages and somehow I got to Brillkids page. When I saw those babies reading... I just had to try and give that incredible chance to my children!!  I read Doman's books... everything made sense... So after a few tries I found my way with Little Reader for English and my own files for Spanish, Little Math, Little Musician... And here we are, at 20 months. They have learnt large amounts of things, although now I'm not keeping track anymore because I stopped testing a few months ago. At first they liked to perform, but after some months I felt I was losing them because of that. So now, absolutely no testing and input, input, input...  There are still large differences between them, but my son has been able to learn the alphabet, lots of sightwords, shapes, numerals, etc, so now I'm convinced there's nothing I should worry about. 

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