Back in March I reviewed a video set for Parent Bloggers Network (that makes me sound old. It's actually a DVD) called "Your Baby Can Read!"
This set is designed for infants to children 5 years of age. The 5 DVD and word card set teaches your children whole language and phonics using a combination of sound, sight and interaction. Your Baby Can Read! takes a multi-sensory approach through interactive DVDs and sliding word and picture cards, which they promise helps a child grasp word recognition -- leading to early reading success.
My son is two and a half and when I went back to refresh my memory on what I wrote the first time around,(here) I was surprised to realize how much his verbal skills have changed since March. I thought this would be the perfect time to start volume two.
Dr. Robert Titzer appears in the opening segment of the video, suggesting that you have your child watch this DVD every day (cool!) twice a day (you mean I can actually get the clothes in the washing machine and get them out the same day?!) It's a good idea, and Dr. Titzer has certainly tried his best to make the DVD as interesting for two year olds as he could with music and pictures and animals. But I could not get my son to focus on these DVDs for thirty minutes twice a day and I'm just not interested in forcing him to watch a video.
It's a good thing I'm not a competi-mommy because my baby can't read yet, but to be honest, I didn't really expect him to be able to. Even though he's not reading after watching these DVDs, I still think they add a lot of value to a toddler's ever expanding universe of communication. My son is asking a lot of questions these days, only he doesn't know how to form a question grammatically. He sort of makes a statement and inflects his voice at the end to indicate that he is asking something. Throughout the video the narrators ask questions starting with "Do you?", "Have you?" & "Can you?" These are things he needs to know how to say in order to form his questions and may not have been able to grasp the first time around.
I work outside the home and one of the benefits of day care is that because he is learning when we are apart, the hours we spend together in the evenings and the weekends are more structured around play. I certainly am trying to incorporate learning into the time we spend together, but it's not my first priority. He needs those hours to be a kid and I need them to be his mom. Devoting an hour to the DVD series each day was not really a practical option for us, but I could see how it could be for someone who has more hours in the day to fill or who is seeking out more educational programming than you find on PBS kids.
Again, as I did after reviewing the first series, I still would recommend this video to any parent. After seeing first hand the changes that a few months can make in terms of language development, I plan to continue to pop these in once in awhile and leave the flashcards in the toy box for him to mull over. I still have time before we focus more intensively on reading, but when I do...
Watch out competi-mommies. My baby's going to read.
