The Advanced Child Academy

[PinkM0nkey]

Does anyone have any experience of the above?

Long and short teaching babies to read and do math before age 4

I don't mean to push my own blog - but I have some very detailed material on teaching reading here: youngadventurer.blogspot.co.uk/ you'll have to trail down past all the dinosaur stuff though.

Literacy is a huge issue to me, and I ended up home educating to prevent my children from being subjected to the reading instruction most common here - which includes training children to read at a very early age. Unfortunately, while most will read the required flashcards at age 4, only 1 in 4 will leave school literate at age 16.

I am vehemently against training children to read too early - but some children do teach themselves at a very early age. There are many advantages to a prepared environment, and many things you can do to encourage literacy with very young children, but first and foremost I would just encourage them to enjoy books.

You can also make your own photo books with single words the child knows well such as their photo and name, your photo and "Mom" etc... A home made alphabet book is also quite helpful, using pictures the child is familiar with for each letter. Cooking and board games can teach maths, and counting toys will give a child an actual concept of numbers rather than learning by rote.

Hope this helps,
Broxi

I think that little reader looks very similar to Glen domain approach and his
Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential.

iahp.org/

I read how to make your baby physically surperb, but the methods were just too extreme for me. I do think that tummy time is important, but 22 hours a day is a wee bit excessive for me.

I have read some of the books but I have not put the ideas into practice. I would not take the particular approach to reading because it does not use phonics. Yes, you can teach a baby to recongise thousands of words, but a child needs the skill to decode new words. I think its far better to use Jolly phonics around a child's fourth birthday or sooner if the child shows interest.

Unless a child is dyslexic its really easy to teach a child to read by synthetic phonics. Contrary to popular belief learning to read does not require a particularly high level of intelligence. The challenge is comprehension. The best way to help comprehension is to read lots of different books to your child and provide an interesting range of life experiences.

I believe that the reason that many children leave school illiterate is that they are expected to learn lots of different ways of learning to read all at once. I think there is a lot to be said for sticking to one method for the first two years of school and then introducing other techniques as the child progresses through primary school.