Thank you all for your well-intentioned replies.
To begin with, my kid is a really intense kid. She loves to be introduced to 25-30 words a session, 2-3 times a day. She has a different scale of retention loss (not superior or anything, just different) and very different style of learning. She absorbs information very quickly. For example, she could memorize 80-85% of Preschool Prep Sight Word and Phonics DVDs on the first viewing after a few weeks of the first viewing. As such, she found LR very boring and very short. I'm already frantically playing catchup at her breakneck pace. I had thought that LR could accommodate or at least become one of my tools that I can regularly use to teach her to read. Alas, I can't.
What perplexed me the most was that she understands many new words very quickly, but she still couldn't read. She recognizes sight words quickly and can read them. The same goes with phonics (letter blends, consonant blends, trigrams, what have you). However, she didn't realize that letters can be blended into words which carries meaning in the real word. This is despite the fact that I hammered all the reading lessons in multisensory way. I think this is because she's very right-brained to begin with. She recognizes words as shapes. I discovered this clue when she could read the same word in one font, but not in another font. I had thought LR could serve to bridge this gap.
To respond to this apparent lack of left-brain training, I try to customize LR to introduce far more words to her, with a different recall patern (I use
Pimsleur's Graduated Interval Recall approach, BTW), and completely different game section. I tried to do so, but I couldn't get it done. I ended up resorting to the same old multisensory flashcard approach.
Then, I try to drill in more phonics approach. And boy does
Reading Bear work wonders! Hats off to those who recommended this free website to me. It suddenly dawned on her that letters can be blended to make words and words carry meaning. I did it about a few days ago, and her reading improved exponentially almost immediately.
Now, I don't know whether it's about maturity issue or not---but nonetheless I feel that LR has been completely superseded by the Reading Bear. Hence, my request of refund.
Regarding about Encyclopedic Knowledge: I am not sure whether flashing knowledge facts would help anyone retaining EK, considering the retention loss factor, learning style, and what not. I think it is far better for one to have complete understanding about something in order to synthesize new knowledge, rather than rote memorization. As such, I am more partial towards multimodal immersion approach, of course, with parent as the subject "expert". However, I have not read any peer-reviewed research papers regarding this area to see if Doman's method could be effective or not. So, I cannot say much on this front, except perhaps about the
Method of Loci (MoL) and its associated approaches, which research has found to be very effective. Given that the MoL approach is so different than Doman's card-flashing approach, I am somewhat skeptical that LR would serve that purpose (i.e., EK) well.
Digg
