One of the more common infomercials out there right now is "Your Baby Can Read." It's pretty impressive. The 18 month-olds through 4 year-old learn to read using whole word recognition. The parents seem impressed as well. Still, I've got to wonder if any of those parents realize that they're homeschoolers.
I would link to their site, but when I tried to navigate away from the site, a deceptive pop-up tried to keep me on their site. I never link to sites like that.
3 comments:
I've seen those videos out there. I wondered about them...seems like there is some logic behind the method, but I wonder if it has any long-term benefits. Sure, a 3 year old reading at a 2nd grade level is impressive, but does it level off at some point in the long-term?
I heard/read somewhere that head start students only have that "edge" until about 3rd grade before their non-head-start peers catch up educationally, which is probably what sparked it.
Long-term vision vs. short term results. Any thoughts? It sure looks impressive...
Hi Jodi! Thanks for dropping by!
Was the study you mention comparing participants of the Head Start program (to non-participants), or just early learners in general? My own early learner is actually increasing her lead over her peers in reading skills.
If anything could be criticized about the YBCR folks is that it is only whole word instruction. You will still need to teach the kid phonics so that they can read words they've never encountered before. My experience is that whole word only takes you so far, and it doesn't help nearly as well as phonics does with spelling.
Hey,
I totally agree with the "whole word"...until I saw the infomercial and started pondering their philosophy:
When a child learns to speak, they naturally learn the general format of speech (i.e. how nouns and verbs interact). Almost any 3 year old with developmentally on-target language is putting together nouns and verbs and adjectives etc. approprately, without being "taught" the parts of speech.
The theroy (according to the infomercial) is that the babies who use the YBCR learn the phonetic compounds and elements the same way...by default, they figure out that "sh" says the "shhhh" sound, and generalize that to other words.
That's probably the element that intrigued me the most; the possibility that the same way a child learns grammer "naturally" through spoken word, they could *possibly* learn phonics the same way, if introduced early enough.
Still has me thinking about the possibility, that's for sure!
(forgive the spelling errors...)
The head start study compared a public school students standardized test scores if I recall correctly, comparing only those who had been in the formal head start program to those who had not.
Post a Comment