Category: Education
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Reading Bear improvements
Here’s our latest Reading Bear update. We’re not done working on Reading Bear–which will always remain a non-profit, free website to teach reading through phonics and vocabulary. Here’s a quick progress report. Alternative reading systems soon supported. We’re putting finishing touches on a feature allowing us to reorganize our words into the order in which they appear in…
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E.’s reading progress
(No, that’s not a picture of E. He doesn’t have glasses.) Just a short report here. I’m delighted with 25-month-old E.’s reading progress. We are not studying phonics nearly as carefully and systematically as we did with H. We have been going through (more or less randomly) the two ending blends presentations, adding s, and…
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A challenge to first grade reading teachers: read in one year! No excuses!
In the course of responding on the “readbygrade3” mailing list (I’m a subscriber), I came across this page on ReadingRockets.org. I was greatly struck by the fact that, here in 2012, professional advisers to reading teachers state that, by the end of first grade, a good student “has a reading vocabulary of 300 to 500…
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Update about the boys
Since I always begin with 6-year-old H. and never seem to have time (in the same post) to discuss now-2-year-old E., I thought I’d begin with E. this time. Besides, it has been eight months since I updated the blog about E., who is now 24 months old. But I am going to keep this…
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Reading Bear’s First Press Release (Please Share!)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Dr. Joe Thomas 901-484-3347 INNOVATIVE NEW WEBSITE, READING BEAR, TEACHES PHONICS AND VOCABULARY FOR FREE Wikipedia Co-Founder’s Latest Project Launches to Acclaim MEMPHIS, TENN., OCTOBER 11, 2012 – The co-founder of Wikipedia has embarked on a new web-based project aimed at teaching children to read in a new innovative, multi-sensory,…
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Does a social contract require us to put our children in schools?
Tony Jones produced an interesting argument against homeschooling. As I understand it, Tony says that we are obligated by a social contract to send our kids to school, and by the fact that we must support society as a whole by not “dropping out.” As he explains, “I live under a mandate to be the…
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“Infant Intelligentsia: Can Babies Learn to Read? And Should They?”
There’s a very good article about baby reading in the latest issue of Pacific Standard, which is what Miller-McClune Magazine is now called. (The magazine is pretty cool–it was described to me as the Pacific Coast version of The Atlantic.) It starts as follows: THE VIDEO CLIP [refers to this] on Larry Sanger’s website shows the cofounder of…
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Reading Bear is complete! Why it works.
After many months of development, I can finally announce: Reading Bear is complete! Reading Bear now has a full set of fifty presentations, with an average viewing time of about 15 minutes each. I haven’t added up the time, but it’s around 12 hours total. It covers a huge number of phonics principles, systematically. Over 1,200…
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Your Baby Can Read closes up shop
The companies behind Your Baby Can Read have, faced with daunting legal costs, gone out of business, according to this Facebook post and, now, the text on YourBabyCanRead.com: FROM ALL OF US AT YOUR BABY CAN READ!THANK YOU FOR YOUR LOYAL SUPPORT AND BEING SUCH GREAT CUSTOMERS! For more than 6 years, Your Baby Can Read!…