How Jayden Can Read???

We got such great comments through facebook and emails about Jayden's progress.  We also got so many questions on how to raise a child to read like Jayden. I believe that there are 3 key components to help a child grow to his/her potential. Those three are: (1) Great foundation. (2) Great attitude and (3) Great Materials. I will go into more detials in future posts.

Since there are a lot questions about what materials I use so that Jayden can read at the age of 16 months, my first recommendation  is Your Baby Can Read products by Dr Titzer. Jayden's grandma discovered this product through infomercial one day, and insisted us to buy it. After reviewing the products and seeing that there are so many other babies who can read at such a young age and its importance in developing the child's ability to read, the love to read and the benefits of these to his/her life, I was impressed and went ahead and purchased the products. Now, the original cost of it is $200, but you can buy it for cheaper at amazon ($149 or so), just click on this link Your Baby Can Read and see for yourself. Also, you will see a lot of reviews about this products.

There are always pros and cons to anything you buy.

For Pro: It works. I started to show Jayden these DVDs when he was around 9 months old. We used to have our parents help out with taking care of the kid, but  about 9 months, we had no help and I needed to occupy Jayden for about 30 minutes a day so that I manage to take care of some personal stuff. I am against kids watching TV, so I had to find a better educated way for Jayden to entertain. I put him on his exersaucer and put the Your Baby Can Read DVD in front of  him. Each DVD is about 30 minutes so it works perfectly for me. He immediately enjoyed the DVDs and still enjoy them until today. I only play the DVD once/day, not twice as the program suggested. And even with that, Jayden now starts reading. So if you want your child to read, please try it. I would suggest to buy the whole early reading system (DVDs, books, flashcards, etc) because it is better to interact with your child in other ways than just letting him/her watching the DVDs). Jayden really likes to pull the sliding cards and enjoys seeing the pictures with the words.

For Con: I know that a lot of people worry about his method of teaching, and "label" it as "site language", which means that the child just memorizes the words, but not really know how to read it phonetically. Then worry about the fact that the kid can't learn phonics by the time they go to pre-school or so. It is not really true. Even Dr Titzer himself agrees that the baby will learn to memorize the words first (how do you teach them phonetically at this age??), this method is called "whole word learning method" but then they will learn to see the pattern of the word  themselves. And in the DVD, there is a portion to teach the kid phonetically. He will show certain similar words to show pattern such as "hat", "cat", or "smilling", "eating". In his new series "Your Child Can Read" for kid from age 3 and up, you can see his methods focus on both phonics and whold word learning methods.

For my understanding, most kids know how to read the "whole word" before they go to school to learn how to read phonetically. With lots of choices of books in the library and bookstores (and most of them have same simple words), your kids will learn the whole words in one way or the other. After discussing with a few moms who have very bright kids who can read before preschool, they told me not to worry about this at all, because their kids can read very well later with phonics.

Now, I believe in a good balance. So Your Baby Can Read  DVDs are not the only one I use. There are a few more products that you can check out. One of them is LeapFrog - Letter Factory : very good way of teaching kid with phonics. I also let Jayden watch the Pre-School Prep which teach kids alphabets, numbers, shapes, colors and words. So don't just rely on one product, but expose your child to multiple products to get the best of all worlds (not all at once but 30 mins or so of DVDs a day is enough). However, I have to say that the credit of Jayden can read go to Your Baby Can Read so there, try it out for yourself, and I hope that your child will have the same result like Jayden. It is in our best interest to give kids the best that we can. Reading early can help your kid enjoy reading, better reader do well in school and open doors for better future. (Plus, if you want them to be multi-lingual, you need to give them time, and earlier learning will provide us additional time to teach our kids other languages. Jayden can speak 3 languages now. Goodluck, enjoy and please let me know how your kids do.