Hello, I am about to have my first child and I stumbled across your site and found this essay very interesting. I’d like to follow your lead. As Emma noted above, the PowerPoint slides link no longer works. Can they simply be replaced by the content on readingbear.org? Thank you.
Not really. I have wanted to post the presentations, but it will require editing.
Dear Larry,
I do not how to thank you for sharing the Flesch flashcards. I had bought the book and have been trying to teach Flesch words to my daughter. Even I felt the process was very dull and thought of attaching pictures to the words. You have made the task easy for me and all people on the planet. Thanks a ton again for all the hardwork….
God bless
Regards,
Dr. Apoorv, India
Hi Larry,
Such a great essay!! I went to the Glenn Doman conference on teaching your baby and liked what I learned but felt the phonics were also integral in learning to read, thus your essay providing everything else I have been seeking. The links for your powerpoint and flashcards no longer work, is this because everything is now on readingbear.org? Just wondering!
Thank you!!!
Emma, thanks for your kind words. Oh, I’ll have to fix the Dropbox link for the enormous zip file of presentations; I stopped using Dropbox. Not sure where I might host that, if not on my own NAS. Too bad slideboom.com seems to have died. I might upload the online-viewable versions of the presentations somewhere else… At least the flashcard link works (for me, anyway): https://larrysanger.org/PhonicsFlashcards.zip
Thank you so much Mr. Larry for the resources and videos.
You children are very lucky to have educated parents that are dedicated to them.
I appreciate your kind words!
Hi Larry, I stumbled upon your website after seeing you speak at the Block to the Future conference with Colin Pape from Presearch through watching on YouTube from Canada.
We have 3 young children age 5,3 and 3 months. I am super excited to have been able to read through this information which provides so much valuable information to help teach our children to read as early as possible
I wanted to thank you for your time in maintaining this website as well as the links you have provided to readerbear and more. Please know that you are making a difference in people’s lives all over the world with your posted material and research.
Thanks again
Nathan
Ontario Canada
Thanks, Nathan! It’s ReadingBear.org. I’m no longer in control of it, but last time I checked it hadn’t changed.
Hello Larry,
I truly admire your work, your patience and kindness to share this great work to the world. I am an advocate of Montessori and started teaching my son alphabet sounds around 1.5, just for experiment mostly. Then he could remember all alphabet sounds before 2, I thought that he could be able to read soon but I was stuck for more than half a year. I am originally from Vietnam, where we learn the language exactly what you taught your kids, but I didn’t realize BLENDING was the essential to reading, not only learning letter sounds and picture (or video) for meaning. When people adapted Montessori to English environment, they focus too much on connecting first letter sound with the object, that create a pathway to the kids keep connecting the beginning sound to the object, then read the whole word, instead of sounding out each phonogram and blend them to make the complete word. At about 2y7m, I intensively used blending to my son. Less than 2 months, he was reading by blending. Now at 3y2m, he is reading books (still with pictures) at can sound out some two syllable words. I also encourage him to sound out words when we talk, he’s very good at that.
Like you said, I don’t care too much about grades or IQ (the way IQ was designed was wrong from the beginning I believe.) However, I value reading, since it’s the key to knowledge, to independence and freedom for kids. A kid who can read, can learn things himself, conduct experiments, learning all by himself, so he will enjoy much more freedom, a much richer childhood than those who have to rely on parents or adults to read for him, tell him what to do.
As a person who cares about education, I also love to experiments what were recorded, to challenge the norms, and see what we can do better. During Montessori time, she observed the kids and concluded that kids could write before read, but that was before technology was so robust, and given parents didn’t spend more time on helping kids learning letters earlier. I often talked to myself, if all kids can read well before 5, what can they bring o this world when they grow bigger? If you look into human brains, and Montessori work, there is an agreement that 0-7 years old are absorbent time, where kids grasp information to their brains like a sponge. So they can learn very fast, especially language, because that is now they can become part of the society.
I am helping my son to learn Math and Science, and all skills to take care of himself based on Montessori too, beside sending him to an AMI school in the morning. If you have time and are interested, I am happy to exchange more information, ideas with you about Montessori.
Again, thank you very much for your ReadingBear website. I am using it to help my son learning more 2-3 letter phonograms. I have the print version but for kids, they need multimedia to excite their learning!!!
All the best,
Dzung
Thanks very much for the kind words and feedback!
[…] need more encouragement, Larry Sanger, a seriously smart guy who co-created Wikipedia, wrote this essay on teaching his son, starting at 22 months, to […]
Larry, we read your essay when our daughter was around 14 months, among a lot of articles we were pondering over early reading and the how-to part. Needless to say, it really motivated us, answered a lot of our questions and more importantly, gave us invaluable thoughts on how to get the teaching and learning going. We always resorted to DIY materials, so as to personalise to the child and greatly helped. Now at 22 months, she’s learning blending and readingbear.org is a wonderful and invaluable help(though, we must admit, we prefer the readingbear videos from the youtube, for its pace, which seems right for the kid at this stage) aided brilliantly by your word flash-card list that we downloaded (and again customised) from your site. And that advice in one of the comment section- read out the sounds and blend – rather than asking the child to do it- works wonders, as after two weeks, she is ready to sound out and blend herself without us prompting. All the while, we still read together fiction and non-fiction on a daily basis, which is a wonderful experience for the parents and the child. We started showing her some of the videos (Preschool and universe) from the Sanger Academy channel once a day, and our daughter relishes them. Thanks for the help and all the great work. All the best !
We like to keep a journal of our activities and the reading journey is captured at
http://blog.arunbhanu.com/2017/01/early-reading-our-take.html
Cheers,
Arya
Arya, thanks so much for your kind words. I apprecate it very much!
My child already turned 6 when his reading was tested at 5th grade level. This child at 4 yrs 1 mo definitely enunciated the words better than my son did at the time. But it didn’t bother me – I was just happy that even when he was 3, his comprehension was already very good. There is no mistake in teaching your child at an early age as long as the child enjoys it and you are not stressing the child out.
Dear Larry
I cannot describe the excitement and sense of connection that I experienced while reading your essay. As a first time mother I had been researching aimlessly on the subject, frustrated with the lack of objective literature and serious research on the effects of teaching young babies how to read.
I am a Glenn Doman baby. My mom took the course “How to multiply your baby’s intelligence” when Glenn Doman visited Colombia over 30 years ago. My sister and I agree that the time and effort that she devoted to us during the first few years of our life were crucial in establishing the path that we followed to personal, social and economic well-being in adulthood.
Falling in love with reading from an early age triggered an insatiable curiosity and sense of wonder that made studying and learning a natural and enjoyable process throughout our lives. Being born in the 80’s in Medellin (Colombia), from a middle class family, we probably could not have had access to the international education and global exposure that we both had thanks to this early advantage.
I live in Hong Kong with my husband and 15-month-old daughter. After a successful career in the fashion industry in Colombia, Venezuela and France, I moved to Hong Kong to assume the role of global sourcing director for a major French retailer.
I met my husband here and soon after we got married, I decided to quit the corporate world to start our own business. We wanted a less stressful and hectic lifestyle and more flexibility with our time to enjoy our shared passion for traveling.
Our daughter was born last year and I now have the privilege to stay at home and enjoy her early years with full dedication. Last spring, my husband and I traveled to Philadelphia to attend the same course that my mom took 30 years ago. Ironically, while we were there, my long-standing conviction in the advantages of early learning was seriously questioned. Despite having had first hand experience with Glenn Doman’s method, I was not 100% sure if I wanted to follow that path with my daughter
Living in Hong Kong for 7 years, I have also witnessed the prevalence of teen depression and anxiety as consequences of the overly competitive nature of the school system here. Young kids face high academic pressure from very early age. During the lectures in Philadelphia I couldn’t help to feel that by teaching our baby daughter math, encyclopedic knowledge, etc. we were somehow embracing this system that we had so adamantly criticized.
My daughter woke up my long-standing interest in education and child development and brought up a new dimension to the subject. I felt the urge to find definite answers from experts in the field, and while reading books and articles from proponents of both extremes; I came upon your essay.
I wasn’t able to put it down until the last page and there, in the very end I felt the “aha” moment with a paragraph that perfectly described my own experience as an early reader with my vision now as a mom: “There is almost nothing better in life than improving the mind with knowledge. Some of my happiest and most rewarding times in high school and college were when I was really learning. Deep knowledge is life-changing and character-changing. So starting early really has little more purpose to me than to improve the chances—not to guarantee, because there are no guarantees in life—that my child will do more of that sort of learning, and enjoy it, in the long run.”
Reading your essay I felt not only inspired and reassured to continue teaching Elena how to read, but I felt motivated to pursue my own studies in education.
Thank you for sharing your case. I wish you all the best in the inspiring and meaningful project that you are leading. I would love to be part of it one day.
Best regards,
Maria
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