Baby Reading

Oprah Winfrey

Have you watched the popular "Your Baby Can Read" infomercial, but not sure it is the best early reading program for you and your baby?

Do you find "baby reading," a little hard to believe, because your little one doesn't even sit still long enough for you to finish reading an entire book to him.

Are you still a little skeptical, or just have a few questions to be answered, before you make the decision to teach your baby to read?

Keep reading, to learn how you can teach your baby to read, even if he doesn't currently sit still long enough for you to read him a Dr. Suess book!

For the past ten years, my wife and I have been teaching our own children to read as toddlers.

For the past four years, I've coordinated an early reading program with Head Start, in the Rock Island school district. In this program, I have trained students from an alternative high school to use simple "baby reading" methods to teach Head Start preschool students how to read!

They have also taught the children to recognize the letters of the alphabet along with many other important early literacy skills.

This year, for the first time, the preschool teachers will introduce the most effective early reading program in the world to over 212 inner-city students in 18 different Head Start classrooms.

Although the early reading program I am speaking of, was originally created for parents, like you and me, who simply want the best preschool reading curriculum available, to teach our own children to read; this program is now being used by kindergarten teachers, as well as ESL teachers working with students learning English, and upper elementary teachers working with struggling readers.

This is a clip of, Amaris, our oldest child (now ten), naming the letters of the alphabet at one, and reading words and sentences as a toddler, after being born 9 weeks premature and more susceptible to “developmental delays."

The proven principles of brain development, that I'll soon share with you, conquered any “developmental delays” she would have had.

The simple approach we used to teach her to read has been used for over fifty years, since the "baby reading" movement began, after the publication of Dr. Glenn Doman's book, Teach Your Baby to Read (available at Amazon and most public libraries).

As parents of six, including our baby angel Elisio , we can assure you that the baby reading experience is incredibly joyful and the baby bonding time is priceless.

Although I've enjoyed considerable success helping kids who can't read, become "grade level" readers, I've often asked myself the following question...

What would these young students lives be like, if their parents knew what I'm about to share with you on baby reading?

I believe their lives would be radically different.

Imagine entering preschool or kindergarten unprepared to succeed.

Walking into kindergarten with two or three years of reading experience, the ability to read a chapter book in any fourth grade classroom across America, or any other developed nation around the world.

The quality of your baby's academic career and the unlimited opportunities that this academic advantage can create for your child are priceless.

Struggling readers are tracked into academic intervention programs, including special education classes, while children who learn how to read between birth and five are often tracked right into the "Talented and Gifted" programs, and various "Accelerated" classes.

If your a "homeschooler," life can be even better for your children, as you can personally ensure that your little readers, get the academic enrichment that stimulates their minds, while providing the academic freedom for them to explore their greatest interests.

Either way, if your children are homeschooled or go to private or public school, they will be smarter, attract more opportunities, and ultimately create better lives, because you made the decision, early in their lives, to teach them how to read!

Get Your "Baby Reading" Questions Answered:

1. Visit the largest and best baby reading Parent Forum in the world, with over 68,000 parents currently teaching their own babies and toddlers how to read!

2. Email me directly with your question: steve@elisios-preschool-activities.com (I typically respond within 24 hours)

3. Sign up for our next FREE monthly tele-seminar on baby reading. (email me and I'll respond with the call-in number and password)

After answering some common questions about baby reading, I'll share with you some preschool curriculum ideas for “making your own” child reading materials, as well as provide you with insight, including both the "advantages" and "disadvantages" of the various early reading programs available today.

Yes, it does work; watch the clip of our daughter reading above.

As Dr. Doman explains in his book How to Teach Your Baby to Read (over 5 million parents just like you, have already read this book), between the ages of birth and five, your baby is already learning spoken language, through their “audio pathways,” or “ears” as I refer to them. This is happening simply by exposing your baby to spoken language.

You can take this one step further, and expose them to written language, starting with single words, through the “visual pathways” or “eyes,” and something “magical” will happen.

Your baby’s developing brain will make an additional association, connecting the written word, to the visual image she already has of the action or object, as well as the spoken word and just like that…she will read her first words!

Repeat the process until she is reading about 200 individual words.

Then start teaching her to read word pairs or "couplets."

Then start adding "sight words," such as the, is, and, a, etc...and she will naturally start reading sentences.

For example:

Step 1 "Single Words": Let's say the word "elephant" and big are a couple of the words you have taught her to read as "single" words.

Step 2 "Word Pairs": Now you put elephant and big together as a "word pair" and she reads the phase "big elephant."

Step 3 "Sentences": She now reads many "single words and "word pairs", so you begin putting words she can read into the context of a sentence. She reads, "The elephant is big."

The words "elephant" and "big" are serving as "anchors" for the sentence, as she naturally figures out the other two words "the" and "is" when you initially read the sentence to her.

She soon reads the sentence and many more on her own!

Amazing! She is reading! Remember to celebrate every session along the way!

It can’t be that simple…. Can it?

YES! It’s that simple.

YES! It works.

YES! Your baby can learn to read.

YES! You can teach your baby to read!

As your baby’s parent, you are the most loving person she will ever know. You are also the most important “teacher” she will ever have throughout her entire life!

The investment in early literacy skills you are making in your baby’s life will have a tremendous impact on her future!

Results will vary depending on many things, such as:

1. How much have you been reading to your baby since birth or even before birth?

2. How much have you been talking to your baby?

3. Have you shown your baby many picture books, picture cards, or taken her to the local zoo or park? Repeatedly?

4. Have you read many rhyming books to your baby? Repeatedly? (Dr. Seuss books are some of the favorites in our home)

5. What is your baby's age now?

Please do not compare your child to others, as each child is a unique individual. The one thing they all have in common though, is a remarkable human brain, that is developing and learning language.

They all can easily and naturally learn the written language of reading!

We have had a variety of experiences with each of our children for various reasons, but I'll share our first experience, since you are probably searching for information to teach your first child how to read.

Eight years ago, I “coincidentally” found the classic book, Teach Your Baby to Read, at my local public library, written by Dr. Glenn Doman. This book, having sold over 5 million copies, may even be at your local public library.

As soon as I saw the title, Teach Your Baby to Read, I grabbed it, and immediately began reading.

I was fascinated by what I was discovering about the human brain and early childhood potential.

At the time our oldest daughter was two and our second daughter had just been born days before.

I couldn’t believe that this book was published in the 1960’s and every parent on the planet, including myself, had never heard about it.

I rushed home and ran into the house to show my wife the book. I was so excited, I told her everything I had already read, while at the library. She looked at me and said, “I don’t think it will work.” My wife is an optimistic person, but something as “unconventional” as babies reading is a little hard to believe.

Sometimes you have to see it to believe it.

(That is our baby girl reading at the top of this page!)

I was so excited and eager to try out the baby reading principles with my two-year-old daughter, Amaris.

I just had to find out if this would really work.

As an elementary teacher, I understood the importance of background knowledge, phonemic awareness, and the alphabetic principle. I had already taught our daughter letter recognition (see the video clip of her above), as well as the popular Baby Einstein animal picture cards.

I followed the instructions in the book and made her some “word-cards” that corresponded with the Baby Einstein animal picture cards I had previously taught her. I showed her the words three times a day, as the book suggested.

These mini-lessons lasted literally seconds. Maybe fifteen to twenty seconds each lesson.

By the end of the week, I felt the joy that you will feel when your baby reads her first words!

I was amazed, as I spread out the words on the living room floor. I showed my baby girl the picture card elephant, covering up the word elephant written at the bottom of the picture card. She crawled over and grabbed the word card elephant.

Incredible!!!

I repeated the process, this time showing her the picture card tiger.

She waddled over and grabbed the word card tiger, held it up, and said, “tiger, grrrr.”

Amazing!!! I was thrilled!

I called for my wife to come and share my joy! We watched our “brilliant” little girl read her first words!

She successfully read seventeen words! I was so excited!

She learned to read seventeen words, after only one week!

I couldn’t believe it! I wanted to tell every parent on the planet to read this book, and apply these principles!

I even started doing parent seminars to teach these principles of early child hood literacy.

Toddlers with brain injuries have learned to read.

In fact, it was at the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential where this breakthrough on early reading was originally discovered…

While working with a child, named Tommy. Tommy had been born with severe brain injuries and even had brain surgery by the age of two! After that surgery the Dr. told his parents he would be a "vegetable" the rest of his life.

His parents refused to accept this fate for their child, and took Tommy to the Institutes.

It was at the Institutes where Tommy read his first words, by the age of three.

Yes, a toddler with brain injuries learned how to read at the age of three, using these powerful principles of brain development.

Since then, thousands of parents of children with brain injuries have taught their children how to read during this fascinating period of early childhood brain development (birth to five).

Now parents of healthy brain babies have learned and used these basic principles to teach their babies how to read!

How would you feel, proudly saying “Yes, this is a video of my two or three year old little girl or boy reading?”

Keep reading to learn the most effective way to teach your baby to read!

While the proven baby reading principles, originally introduced by Dr. Doman, are timeless, and based on brain research and development…times have changed. The best teaching tools being used today are more powerful than ever!

It is easier to teach your baby to read today, because of the power of technology.

When Dr. Doman first published is book, he instructed parents to make word cards out of poster boards. Yes, take some poster board, cut them in 5”x 22” strips and use the fattest red marker you can find to make word cards. Since babies learn to read so fast, he recommended having 100 words ready to go before you get started.

That is actually how I got started teaching my first daughter how to read. I bought some poster boards, went to Kinkos and cut them into 5” strips. I then shopped around to find the fattest red marker I could find. I went home and spent all night making these word cards. I don’t have the best penmanship in the world. I actually have terrible hand writing, so it took me forever to print these word cards, as neat as I could, using this fat red marker. The smell of permanent marker gets to you after a few hours!

With our second daughter, I started making slide-shows in PowerPoint. This was much better than getting red marker stains on my hands and smelling ink for hours at a time. Yet it was still very time consuming, and I’m also not the most technically savvy person in the world either. In fact, that was actually the first time I ever made a slide show in PowerPoint.

The only challenge I had now, was the massive amount of time I spent looking online for quality images to add to my slide-shows for my little girl.

Don’t worry, I’m about to share with you something that can save you countless hours of time, getting your hands stained red, or sitting in front of your computer searching for images and making PowerPoint slideshows.

About two years ago, our second son was born, and I happen to be online when I discovered what every parent of a newborn should invest in, if they want to teach their baby how to read.

I discovered a software program specifically designed for parents like you and me, who want to teach our babies to read.

It was created by a father who taught his little girl, Felicity, how to read, using the basic principle originally taught by Dr. Glenn Doman.

This amazing video clip shows the potential reading ability that your little girl can experience!

This little girls father, KL, has now created the most effective, easiest to use, tools for teaching your baby how to read!

My boys Love It!

Keep reading and I’ll share with you how you can use the same baby reading tools to produce incredible results with your little reader.

This software is fascinating. It is called "Little Reader" and it is by far the most powerful tool that you can use to teach your baby how to read her first words, and literally thousands more!

Find out how Little Reader can keep your baby actively engaged when teaching him how to read!

Watch the following video to discover why it is also the easiest tool for parents to use, when teaching baby reading!

Your baby will learn phonics naturally with the “right brain” learning lessons included in the Little Reader Learning System.

This baby reading program has a “daily curriculum” that makes it easy to follow and automatically adds new words daily to keep your baby excited and looking forward to the lessons, or in our family, “play.”

Your baby will love the variety of words, pictures, and video clips included in the daily curriculum. The colors, sounds, “real world” pictures, and interactivity built into the slide-shows will have your baby smiling, as she sits in your lap learning to read!

Your baby will learn to recognize letters on sight, with Alphabet slide-shows!

Your baby’s level of phonemic awareness, or ability to recognize rhyming sounds and word patterns, will dramatically increase!

Your baby’s background knowledge will explode, as you expose your baby to the over 3,000 beautiful color images, video clips, and words built into the daily lessons!

The books provided (Deluxe Package Only) will re-enforce the words your baby will learn in the daily lessons.

The “Little Reader Story Books” will turn bedtime reading into an activity that enhances your baby’s ability to actually read!

The “Pattern Phonics Flip Cards” (Deluxe package Only) will help your baby develop her phonics skills, such as decoding new words, which is essential to reading success.

Your baby will also enjoy and learn “encyclopedic knowledge,” from the thousands of slide-shows made by other parents and shared in the online community network.

You can expose your baby to dozens of languages through slide-shows posted in the community sharing network, as an added bonus.

A couple years after I taught our daugters to read, I discovered the video set produced by Dr. Titzer, based on the same basic principles Doman taught over fifty years ago. Through the use of video, he added some interactivity that he called the “multi-sensory-approach.”

I tried showing the videos to our son, who was born five years after my discovery of the Teach Your Baby to Read book, but he didn’t like them. I think they are decent videos, but he just wasn’t into them. While the sessions in the Little Reader software program last seconds, the Titzer videos last about twenty minutes.

The problem with videos is that they play the same thing over and over again. There is no variety, which is essential to keep your child interested in learning to read new words.

While videos can be entertaining for young children, they are not best for teaching reading, because they are not dynamic enough.

The best early childhood reading program, mentioned above, is highly engaging for your baby by providing variety, and multiple opportunities for interaction and personalization. These are features that a video based program just can't provide.

The price varies between about $100 for the "do it yourself" materials to $250 for the very best baby reading program available.

This may seem expensive if you look at it as a software program.

When you really think about what it can do for your baby, it's not expensive at all.

Most parents, myself included x5, have spent more than $250 on diapers in each of our baby's first months of life. Those diapers came in handy, but where did they end up?

Right in the garbage can!

This investment will last a lifetime.

What would you do if four months from now, your baby was reading, or ten years from now was an Honors student, or eighteen years from now won a full academic scholarship to Harvard, Yale, or even your state university...and someone said, I'll give you your $250 back in exchange for all of the benefits that your daughter received from the Little Reader program.

As parents, we would say, "Keep the $250, this investment in my child's life is priceless!"

Before you spend anything, get the rest of your questions answered at the Parent Forum , I mentioned above.

If you "create your own," you'll end up spending around $100 card stock, ink, and various pictures of the various thematic units you create, by the time you have made all of your teaching materials.

The "Your Baby Can Read" video-based program will cost you about $215. I know they offer a "Free Trial." From my own experience, I don't recommend this video-based program, but if you really want to try it out, visit their site at: YourBabyCanRead.com

The Little Reader baby reading software runs between $149 (Basic Program) - $249 for the Deluxe Program.

No doubt about it, I think this is the best early reading program available today.

Try their Free Trial. They have great customer reviews and you have nothing to lose.

You want to make sure it is something that your baby really likes and something that you are excited about doing with your baby on a regular basis, about five days a week, a few minutes at a time.

Just like anything else, you want to "test drive" it, to make sure it meets your expectations and you are going to get the results you want.

Most parents who have read this sentence have decided to try the Free Trial.

If your just like these parents, I want to congratulate you!

You are giving your baby the "Gift of Literacy," and the bonding experience is priceless.

1. Sign up for the Parent Forum, to get any questions answered along the way, and celebrate with like minded parents.

2. Try the Little Reader Free Trial mentioned above.

3. Approach these short interactive literacy activities as “play,” and your baby will learn to read!

This is so easy to do, when you have the right tools!

Call in on one of our FREE tele-seminars if I can be of any further help or if you just want a group of parents to celebrate with.

I LOVE hearing from parents teaching their baby how to read!

I am always so excited, hearing the joy in a mother’s voice, as she shares the experience of her baby reading her first words!

I also love receiving e-mails, from mothers and fathers around the world, reporting babies reading their first words, as their tremendous joy is certainly reflected in their written words!

You will experience the same joy!

Imagine your little baby reading her first words! Doesn’t it bring a smile to your face, right now!

How will you feel?

Who will you tell?

What will you do?

Through all of these early childhood experiences, your baby's overall intelligence will increase dramatically.

Your baby will become smarter and smarter each time you sit her on your lap for a daily lesson, that you can easily complete within five minutes.

These will create priceless bonding moments for you and your baby.

Those five minute investments will add up and make an incredible difference in your baby’s life.

You will give your baby the Gift of Literacy…that will last a lifetime.

This is a priceless gift that you will give your baby.

This investment in your baby’s life will last for the rest of her life. Your baby will ultimately become a smarter person and lifelong learner.

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