I started going through this program with our daughter when she was 2 2/3 years old. She is more than a month away from 3 and we are now at lesson 50. What is the standard at that level? Here are 2 lines from lesson 49: "a man gave an old coat to an old goat". My daughter is sight reading that (not having to sound out the words), but most of the time will confuse "coat" with "goat" and will possibly say "give" instead of "gave".
That will explain the 5 stars I'm giving the book, so if you need to make a purchasing decision go ahead and order the book already. The rest of this review will detail a bit more about our experiences and advice I have for other people purchasing this book. I think you'll find it valuable.
IMO, the key to understanding early learning is to realize that pretty much any complex task can be reduced to a set of simple tasks and rules for determining the order of those tasks. The way you teach anyone, be it a toddler or a university student - is reducing what you want your student to accomplish to a set of tasks that your student can accomplish, assessing their ability at each task, and teaching the skills involved with those tasks. After you have successfully taught each sub-task in a task, teach the task (the integration of the sub-tasks) as a skill.
That is why the author is a genius for putting this book together - he has identified each small skill involved in reading, and lays out a practical method to teach those skills in the order necessary. At the price that this book sells for, it is a steal. Buy it already. It will do infinitely more for your child's ability to read than spending 50 times the equivalent money on 50 glittery 10 page cardboard books with 3rd grade reading level that will do next to nothing to teach your child how to read.
As an example, I started with the
Bob Books
. Which are good of course, but you soon learn that when your child can sound out the words, "saying it fast" as the next stage is a separate skill that needs to be taught and your child doesn't know what you mean. So you have to teach that skill. And there are a host of separate skills that are not obvious to anyone who has not tried to teach a toddler how to read. This book covers each of those skills!
Looking at the other comments, I realize that there are very few other parents who have tried to go through this with a child my daughter's age. It did not happen in a vacuum. We went through starfall (google it) from since before she was two, and then taught her how to use the computer sufficient to navigate through starfall by herself when she was maybe 2 1/3 or so. She would spend an hour a day or so by herself, of her own volition, navigating through the letters at first and then everything else on the site. In this way she was laying down the connections between neurons in the skills of understanding of the letters and what their sounds were, and in recognizing patterns.
As stated, we had already started with the Bob books a week prior to TYCTR. And prior to that we had practised each of the sounds of the alphabet, so that she was ready to sound out words by the time the book arrived. To be honest, we could have started on this book well before we did. However, the time preceding was by no means wasted. I would have chosen to do things differently though, especially the actual sounds of the words. So, buy this book before your child is ready for it is good advice - it will teach you other skills that are useful for your child, and prevent her having to unlearn your previous amateurish teaching.
What ended up happening is that we ended up coasting through the early lessons until we hit a wall. And while the vernacular is to "hit a wall", what she really hit was not a wall but a ramp that was a bit too steep for her - the natural rate of her ability to learn, as determined by the state her brain is growing at, coupled with its prior training. We hit this ramp at about lesson 43 or so. She was protesting it, and not enjoying the process any more. (I would well recommend buying the author's other book,
Give Your Child A Superior Mind
as mentioned on the front cover - as it will explain the learning adaptations that your child is going through that you interpret as "mistakes". Note to the author/publisher - get thas book reprinted, please! So be patient.)
I also suspect that the "wall of text" the stories at the end became a bit intimidating for her, especially at the end of a lesson. Note that it's actually no more words than a typical Bob book, which she will munch through happily.
That's not a knock on the book at all. The author can't control the pace at which your child can learn. So, what did we do? We went back 10 lessons and started again from there. And rather than be constrained by the arbitrary "lesson" format of the book, we did half a lesson at a time. Sometimes finishing it in a day. My daughter was enjoying it again!
Teaching your child to read in this way is as much an education for the parent as it is for the child. Here is my advice:
-You will get the book and look at the 30! page intro and the orthography, and think "Whoa!". But have faith, the author knows what he's talking about. Boy, does he know what he's talking about.
-Get feedback from your child (pay attention to their ability to concentrate etc.) You will have far better progress at the start of the day than at the end of the day, when their brains are tired. This should ideally be a morning activity. Also, don't be too hard. If they are struggling to concentrate, often they are coming down with a cold or flu. Be gentle.
-Use bribery and blackmail. ;) The holy trinity of a sticker on a calendar, a lolly (jube) and a movie will move mountains. I don't have a problem with this - consider how addictive television is. That's what you have to compete with. 100 years ago when all kids had to play with was cardboard boxes, maybe little of this bribery would have been necessary.
-Do it every day. It becomes a nice ritual for you, a great way to bond with your child. It also teaches your child that a little bit of effort applied regularly can achieve great things.
-Dispense with the writing until they (want to) learn to hold a pen properly. When they are ready, go back through this book with the writing parts (I think we are about to start that now.) Reading is an easier skill to learn than writing. Which leads me to...
-The maximum mental ability at a given age in a given toddler is genetically governed. You can't exceed this limit, but you can reach a level you otherwise wouldn't - by providing a nurturing environment. Note also that there will be genetically defined times that a mental ability "comes online". The corollary to that is that if your child is not ready for something, don't force it! Look at what your child IS ready for, and teach that instead. Gauge, gauge, gauge.
-From that perspective, attempt to do things the author's way, but don't force things and don't feel that you need to say word for word what the author recommends. Achieving success with a child at the youngest level requires a knack for seeing what the child CAN accomplish, and teaching that. The younger your child is (developmentally speaking), the more you will have to ad-lib, in order to maintain the child's attention. Going too fast is an error, and going too slowly is also an error. And sometimes your child will be stubborn and want to do it her way, and look at what she is doing. Maybe she knows better than you do? For example, my daughter has decided from lesson 45 or so that she wants to sight read everything she can, including the story at the end. I let her. The book says to sound everything out first, but now we just sound out the difficult words.
-Another thing I notice is that I think she is starting to sound out the difficult words in her head rather than verbally. Rather than enforce that she sound everything out, I'm letting her try it her way.
-A great exercise, and one my child loves, is "find the words". The book starts this some time early in the piece, and stops well before lesson 50. However, we do this every single time because my daughter loves this so much, and we have inadvertently found that it is probably the most effective way to teach sight reading. We find every single word, not just in the paragraphs at the end but through the word lists. Now we break the paragraphs at the end (ironically, using a Bob book as the block) into two sections so that finding the words is manageable. (Note that we do this AFTER we have read the words in question).
-I think that you need to get excited about some aspect of it. During a time when my daughter's patience waned, I had to use a trick from someone else here, and have her stuffed animal read the story. It worked. But "find the words" (said in an excited, salesman-like tone) is the game that she likes to keep coming back to. Whatever your child likes in the lesson, remember it, tell her she's good at it, that she loves to do it, praise her, tell her that you're proud of her. She will identify that and you can use it to provide motivation.
-We read each word "Lesson XX", e.g. "Lesson 45". It's a great way to teach counting in the double digits, she has picked up the pattern already, though the exception of not saying "forty zero" for "40" confounds her sense of logic. But remember that you should be teaching basic maths concepts (e.g. counting) at the same stage you are teaching the reading. Numeracy is as important as literacy.
-Don't be surprised if your child improves her spoken sentence formation as a result of seeing grammatically correct sentences laid out for her. It will improve more than just her reading.
That's probably enough for now. I hope this helps someone. And to those reviewers who say that this book is boring - well, maybe it is. But it is effective, and it can be spiced up. And it is probably the quickest way you can get your child to read books that are sufficiently complex that they ARE interesting. The end goal here is to be able to get your child to the stage where they are good enough at reading to allow an addiction to reading to develop, and at that stage you can just select interesting books for them to read. If they are reading for a few hours a day because they love to read, think how much faster they are going to learn (many things, not just reading) than reading for twenty minutes a day on your lap.
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IT WORKS!!!
FUN FACT: You must pre-read the text prior to jumping into the lessons so that you know and understand what to do BEFORE you sitdown with your child. (Just as with any lesson). Once you get a grasp of the structure and flow of the lessons, you'll be smooth sailing with your emerging reader!!!The 1-star reviews of this book made me a bit sad because this is a good program, you just have to understand what you are doing prior to starting the lessons. OF COURSE!!!I am an Educator and I now homeschool my son... He's doing great, currently on lesson 23 and his confidence is booming!!! We complete 1-2 lessons per day and his favorite part is reading the few sentences at the end of the lesson and putting a sticker on the chart for completion! I'm glad we have this tool to complement our homeschool regime.
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Bastante útil
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s. c
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Reviewed in India on August 24, 2023