Your Baby Can Read!  The title alone activates the competitive alpha-parent deep inside you, the one who secretly gloats when your kid does stuff first before older ones in your social circle.  “I want my baby to read!”  We live in a test-to-death, No Child Left Behind Except Yours world, and it’s hard not to let some of that seep in after reading the umpteenth parentblog post about freakin’ pre-school applications.  Countless products hold out the promise that if you let your kid read/watch/play with their entire line of stuff, your kid will become like that famous physics dude with the gnarly hair.

 

This, however, is a little different.  Dr. Titzer’s program seems to fuse ideas about language acquisition from both whole language- and phonics-based pedagogies and multiple intelligence theory [sorry, ex-teacher, can’t help the ed-speak!], and you know what?  It makes sense.  The basic idea is repeated exposure to the written word and explicit connection to its sound and meaning.  Makes sense—a toddler can learn by repetition that, say, the written word “elephant” means that big funny animal that’s in so many of her picture books and that it sounds like, well, I’d do a phonetic spelling but I don’t know how to make the schwa symbol on the computer.  But anyway, the idea is that a kid can move from recognizing that whole written word and connecting it to both sound and meaning to being able to, down the line, read new and unfamiliar words based on an understanding of those building blocks (letters, syllables, phonemes, whatever).  Again, makes sense.  I remember being amazed when my nephew, who’s now a tween, was a toddler and could tell us what channel the TV was on because he knew all the word-and-graphic logos.

 

Titzer adds in multiple intelligence theory for good measure—recognizing that different people learn in different ways and that tapping into, say, one’s visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (that is to say, physical) intelligences all at once will reinforce the material and the processes being taught.  So on the DVDs, your kid will see the written word, hear the spoken word, be invited to say the word, sing the word, act out the word, et cetera.  

 

Again, it all makes sense, and it probably does work, and I bet it would work for The Pumpkin.  After all, I was worried, when she started “reading” the letters of the alphabet from one particular book, that she might have trouble extrapolating the knowledge to, say, different cases or typefaces.  But she’s done fine, and can now recognize her own name (and, of course, the favorite word of toddlerhood, “no,”) no matter the font or if certain letters are capitalized or not.  Also, I’m reminded of our short-lived attempt at baby sign language.  After trying to keep up with the repetition for a handful of signs, like “milk” and “more” and “all done,” we gave up, thinking she’d picked up none of it.  Months later, she busted out with the signs—though, of course, it took her dense parents a little while to figure out that that was what it was.