Carlie’s Story

I have a MAD passion for teaching babies to read. When I taught my daughter Sarah (now 27), I was utterly amazed that she could actually read at about 9 months. Sarah, for some reason, was more advanced than her daughter Carlie and, at 15 months, Sarah could pick out any of a hundred words for you that we had in a box. Carlie’s not at that stage yet. When Sarah first started to speak a lot, at about 16 months, she read the words for us, saying them for the first time as she read them. Sarah had read well over 100 books by age 5. At age 7 she placed 3rd in a spelling bee. The winner was 12. When tested for her spelling level in a private school at 8 years old, she shocked the teachers by not misspelling any of the words on the test, so she did not take spelling after that. As I said, Sarah now attends UCLA School of Law. She finished her undergraduate work at UCLA with close to a 3.8 GPA.

We started Carlie on word cards at 4 1/2 months and she could recognize the word GRANDPA on my shirt at that age. Testing babies is delicate because they don’t like the pressure and they don’t think it’s a big deal to prove they can read, so it’s hard to tell what they can do in the first few months of teaching. By 9 months or so Carlie would consistently pick out the right word when asked to choose from two words. We started her on the Your Baby Can Read DVDs at 11 months and she could not get enough of them. It has added probably 100 new words to her reading vocabulary. Now, at 15 months, she’s seen probably 200 or more words and she knows 10 dog breeds, 15 bird species, 15 musical instruments, MANY animals and we are working on her alphabet and U.S. presidents. The more she learns the more basic knowledge she has to build on.

I have always been amazed that parents do NOT use this. It is ridiculously easy and the kids just love it.