Thank you! Excellent testimonial!

I decided to try to unseat that irrelevant comment about the Orton-Gillingham method as the top comment, by writing this: http://www.quora.com/Parenting/How-effective-is-the-Reading-Bear-learn-to-read-program/answer/Larry-Sanger-2

Thanks!!!

I'd like to update the list. We've read a LOT of stuff since I last updated it.

Here are a few things that might not be on that old list:

Bond, Michael. A Bear Called Paddington. 5.7 Lightweight, fun, enjoyable to H., not great literature.
Cleary, Beverly.  All the Ralph S. Mouse books; all the Henry Huggins books; Socks.
De Jong, Meindert.  The House of Sixty Fathers. 5.5 - Almost finished with this. Pretty dark, and "literary," but actually a nice story with some very emotional moments.
Dahl, Roald. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  5.9 - H. hugely enjoyed this.
Dahl, Roald. Matilda. Watched the movie (which was really good!), then quickly read and enjoyed the book.
D’Aulaire, Ingri and Edgar P. D’Aulaire’s Norse Gods and Giants. Quite enjoyable. Good intro to Norse myth.
Lewis, C.S.  The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. 6.1.
Lewis, C.S.  The Magician’s Nephew.  5.6.  More enjoyable than LWW.
Lewis, C.S.  The Horse and His Boy.
McCaughrean, Geraldine.  Gilgamesh the Hero.  5.0.  Surprisingly good adaptation in every way.
Travers, P. L. Mary Poppins. 6.1 Not as great as its reputation. Entertaining, but a little weird. Movie is better.
Wilder, Laura Ingalls.  On the Banks of Plum Creek. 5.2 Fantastic book, like the others.

More out of order:
Daewood, N. J. Aladdin and Other Tales from the Arabian Nights. Rather good, but not easy.
Brooks, Walter R. Freddie the Detective. H. liked it a lot. I didn’t read it so I can’t report any more!
Grahame, Kenneth. The Reluctant Dragon.  4.4 – A dragon turns out to be a pacifist, St. George doesn’t want to kill him. Must appeal more to eccentric English types than us.
Hardy Boys series – first four. H. really ate these up, loved them, made him all excited about detective work.
The Spiderwick Chronicles series, Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles series
MacDonald, Betsy. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. 4.5 Moralistic but in a way that is highly entertaining to kids. H. liked these a lot.
MacDonald, Betsy. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s Magic.
Selden, George. The Cricket In Times Square. 5.9. – H. liked it well enough but probably not his favorite. Very “literary”; OK.
Burgess, Thornton. The Adventures of Old Mr. Toad or similar, one or two of them. This long series was my dad’s favorite growing up. H. tolerated it. No opinion myself as I still haven’t read them!
Flat Stanley series, most if not all of them. Very lightweight, silly, likeable to H., not great literature, but fine.
Sherlock Holmes, Baskervilles & collected tales, from Stepping Stones (I think?) and also Great Illustrated Classics. (There have been a number of other adaptations he’s tackled but I’m not keeping track of those anymore.)
Who Was Queen Elizabeth? and Who Was Ferdinand Magellan? and several more in the series. Recommended. Maybe not the very best, but decent and easy to read.
Many Basher books like The Periodic Table
Harry Potter #1 and #2 – at age 5, he lost interest halfway through #3

I read about half of those books to H. The rest he read himself. Right now he prefers nonfiction but is doing Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island, the originals, with a dictionary, because I ask, although he doesn't seem to mind too much and even enjoys them, though they are definitely challenging.

This is not at all a complete list, the room where the chapter books are is a mess. Also, we've read parts of many others, or listened to them but didn't finish reading them; but I'm not including them here.

@PokerDad - thanks!

@viv, we use the Windows version. The problem with the iPad version is that (as far as I could tell, last time I looked) there is no way to export your (all-important!) data from the iPad app to the desktop app. It's very annoying. I really like Piotr, the Supermemo guy, but if he doesn't want to do something (like make the program more user-friendly), he doesn't do it! But maybe they'll fix that. Anyway, for now, even though I would much prefer to use my iPad, I'm using the desktop.

Besides, when you get down to it, you'd have to have the software & the app accessing your data "in the cloud." There'd be no other way to make it work, because you constantly have to be at the keyboard, and I don't want to input questions using the iPad. There are also lots of features of the software that I use that I'm pretty sure I couldn't use on the iPad. Maybe we'll do it by accessing my desktop via my iPad, with one of those programs that lets you do that, but...nah, the desktop has to be on and not sleeping, and to ensure that, we'll already be at the computer. So...

Can I ask anyone to write up your experience with Reading Bear in answer to this Quora question? I'd answer it myself, but I'm kind of biased. :-)

http://www.quora.com/Parenting/How-effective-is-the-Reading-Bear-learn-to-read-program

OK, here's a report!

I love Supermemo. Although we didn't study so much over the summer, we continued to do Supermemo review daily. During summer we stopped adding questions and tried to get the daily commitment down to something manageable, but then about a month ago I decided to upgrade to the latest Supermemo which enabled us to put questions in priority order and "postpone" any items that are left over. So now we review 40-50 questions per day, no more. Now we're adding lots of questions every day, 10-15 per day I guess. We now have over 1,000 questions in the database, and according to Supermemo's statistics, he has 92% retention of this material. It used to be 95%, but went down after we started using the priority+postponing feature. This is to be expected: if you increase the amount of material in the database more than you can effectively memorize, your retention rate will drop. But I say it's better to have 90% retention of virtually all the material we want to retain than 95% retention of only a very modest amount of material. The most difficult part of the priority+postponing feature has been going back and prioritizing ~800 old items. I still have 400-500 items to prioritize. But it's really a great system--works excellently. We almost always review the stuff that I think is important, and we do eventually get around to less important stuff.

We've added questions from two new sources. Beginning this new school year, H. has been reading (to himself, during his hour-long reading period) Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island, the originals, without much complaint and even with a bit of enthusiasm. But since these are quite advanced, of course he doesn't know quite a bit of the vocabulary. So I sit him down with my iPad, with the dictionary app open (and a stern warning not to open any other apps), and he looks up words he doesn't know. Afterwards, sometimes (only 1/3 or 1/2 of the time) I mine his words looked up for items to add to Supermemo. He has memorized a few dozen vocab items that way. Another thing he does now is read to himself nonfiction a half-hour and sometimes a full hour, in addition. This is because I am now using mealtimes to read to baby E., not H. Since I have no time to read and analyze this nonfiction material for him, I have him make questions after he's done reading. He ends up making far too many questions, half of them being about trivia that he needn't memorize, but half of them being perfectly fine. This is also an excellent way to get him to think about what he has just read. I type in a selection of his questions and I think he enjoys seeing material that he read to himself.

This has made it possible for him to read and learn a lot from various books about the human body (his latest "what I want to be when I grow up" is a doctor). We got the entire "Horrible Science" series in a box, $50 or so for 3000+ pages (http://www.amazon.com/Bulging-Box-Books-Horrible-Science/dp/1407110357), which looks great and he's been reading them just for fun quite a bit. It has a lot about the human body, about 5 books relevant. Very much a boy's series of books. Anyway, sometimes he makes questions about those, but more often his questions are from the "True Books" we got.

In just the last week we switched from one long review, which was cutting into evening reading time, to three short reviews, before breakfast, after lunch, and before bedtime reading, each session 15 questions in 7.5 minutes. Often we do more than 15 which is good. Timing the review sessions keeps H. on track--otherwise he gets distracted. 7.5 minutes turns out to be an excellent review length: long enough to do a substantial amount, short enough to seem, well, short. Occasionally we've done 10 minutes three times a day but that seems like a little too much.

H. can do review by himself, although I don't usually ask him to. I'm fairly confident that when E. is ready to start Supermemo, when he's 4 or 5 or so I guess (I wouldn't have wanted to do it with H. before age 5), then H will be 9 or 10, and I think he'll be able to take over all aspects, question-writing and review. I'll be sad because I won't be able to learn everything H. is learning. I'm learning a lot too!

Occasionally H. resists review, but not as much as in the past. Doing it three times a day has made him even more amenable. He is often quite enthusiastic about adding questions and requests that questions be made out of this or that.

One excellent side-benefit of this system is that there is now an easy way to get H. to solidify his memory of all the little pieces of background information: time, measurements, directions, family birth dates, etc. We also use it to solidify his memory of things like skip counting by 3s, 4s, and 6s, and the random addition or multiplication fact that just isn't sticking.

The bottom line: H. really is learning a lot. If we keep it up, then I am convinced that with significant time investment and support from me, in the first years of doing it, he's going to know boatloads about everything by the time he is 10. He'll have memorized zillions of facts he has studied about every period of history, every branch of science, geography, math, grammar, etc.

Reading Bear's benefactor is very interested in adding a spaced repetition feature to Reading Bear. This will take money and time so I don't know when you might see it.

H. is no longer reviewing recordings...it just occupies too much time and we couldn't fit it in along with the Supermemo review.

End of brain dump!

Sonya, very interesting. E. (22 months) now has a 75% success rate, I'd say, for the short vowel presentations, when I ask him to say the words without any sounding-out. But it varies quite a bit. If he's really into it he can get almost all of them. If not, it's pointless. It's definitely effortful for him and I think he still doesn't have all of the letter sounds perfectly memorized, so we're still reviewing ABCs. Also, I know for a fact that he can sound out some new words, because he read the word "tin" and "Jim" without any sounding out which isn't in Reading Bear or in any other source, that I can recall, so I'm pretty sure he has not memorized those. But on the other hand he definitely has memorized some words, including some CVC words which he very reliably gets. Oh, and yesterday, he read the word "truck" off a "Truck Entrance" road sign without any help. I'm fairly sure he memorized that one from any of various videos and books.

I sometimes feel like I'm not doing all for E. that I should, but, well, I've got to be working full time...

kmum, make sure you press the "HD" button to use the lower-quality versions of presentations. This should make Reading Bear load much faster, if your Internet connection is slow.

--Larry

Excellent!

Bear in mind, we didn't start the hour-a-day thing until H. turned 5. Also, when he was 1-3, he was on the floor with his books for well over an hour, indeed. When he was 4, I continued to read a lot to him, but he was reading very little to himself. This bothered me, so basically, when he turned 5, I had him start reading to himself whether he wanted to or not. After a couple weeks he had no problem with it and he still doesn't. Actually, in the last...year?...he has gone back to reading various things in his spare time. Actually, it's usually not the most challenging stuff. Tintin is his favorite at the moment, but he has also re-read all sorts of stuff that I read to him a few years ago, like Berenstain Bears books and picture books that I've been reading to baby E. Occasionally when he's really into a book he'll continue outside of the assigned hour's worth of reading. So while sitting in the corner I let him continue reading Roald Dahl's Matilda, and often lately he picks up books about the human body since now he declares he wants to be a doctor. Also, now that he's in first grade, FWIW, I've got him reading 90 minutes to himself: an hour of literature and half hour of serious nonfiction (for now, his choice).

Thanks for the reports...any more?

A quick fix, I find, is to quickly refresh the page (not the browser's refresh function, use the "f" key or the Reading Bear browser's refresh button).

In other news: try the iPad app iSwifter. It actually makes Reading Bear work on the iPad, although the quality is hit and miss, I'm finding.

@Korrale4kq, I passed that along to the programmers. Thanks.

Another question for Reading Bear users/testers! If you do use Firefox, are you having any problems using that? I myself can't get it to work in my (updated) version of Firefox! It works useably in Chrome, although the timing is a little off. We're still figuring things out...

That's what our internal testing is telling us: it works with Firefox. But why doesn't it work so well with IE and Chrome?

Question to everyone: have you noticed, lately (as in the last week or two), a tendency of Reading Bear to be off by a fraction of a second in how the audio and text flashing match up? I have this problem on my desktop machine, but the programmers say it's not a problem for them--but then, they're closer to the server, which I believe is in New Jersey. "Yes, I'm having this problem" would be helpful, but so would "No, I'm not."

+1!

awesome!  we are going to go check it out : )

You can thank Heidi as our #1 volunteer!