Homeschool World Forum

Has anyone tried Glenn Doman's methods? Has anyone succeeded?

Ramona

This is the How To Teach Your Baby To Read guy?

Ick. No thank you. There are so many things wrong with his method I wouldn't even know where to begin, but it's never coming in my house.

I think both methods are extremely important. As was mentioned before, sight reading is best suited to words that don't follow standard grammar rules. learning phonics is also very important to enable the child start to read independently and confidently.
this is a great article on the subject

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/Reading_Wars.html

i think focusing only on phonics is very limiting, great for initial learning but will do nothing for expanding the vocabulary. While reading, older children will naturally expand their vocabularies through sight reading, the more they read the more words they will memorise. a great advantage of whole language approach is that children who learn that way will have much more accurate grammar and spelling. they will often also understand the word in more depth, have more synonyms associated with it.
i am not a proponent of rote learning though, I think all learning should be meaningful and children can enjoy both types if they are carried out properly.

I'm creating some online flashcards, but they are the kind with the picture and the word, not just the word. The whole site is more geared towards Doman's "encyclopedic knowledge" program. My 2-year-old has been using them about 6 months and shows no signs of reading yet, but she really enjoys them, asks for "flashcards" all the time, and is acquiring an impressive vocabulary. I made a couple of sets with just words, but they seem too boring and she almost always chooses sets with pictures over sets with only words.

bright_tomato: There are admittedly words that don't fit in with the basic phonics rules, but those rules should be well-learned before you move on to the exceptions. You will be much better at sight-learning words once your brain has been trained into breaking words down into patterns.

hi Lauxa. I think that's excellent, I used the same method with my son from 6 months. I used my own range of cards with him (http://www.brighttomato.com.au/Gallery.htm) and I made up lots of other ones, just printed them out on paper and inserted them into folders with clear plastic sleeves, he loved them. Any exposure to print is highly beneficial and will help kids get ready for learning how to read later. and, yes, it also expands vocab.
I love your site and if you don't mind I will post a link to your site from my Links page.

one suggestion, if you don't mind, I think it would be great if there was navigation link back to the site from the flashcards page. otherwise when you close it, you lose the site and can't choose the next presentation.

Of course sight reading is necessary at some point. My point is that you should make an effort to avoid sight reading as much as possible pre-phonics, since sight reading gives children the impression they can learn to "read" without actually bothering to learn letter patterns. You end up with kids randomly guessing words rather than sounding them out, which is counterproductive.

Incidently, road signs are not necessarily the best example, since they are designed for people who can't read That's why they're different shapes and colors. A stop sign is still a stop sign even if you write the word "stop" in some other language.

Sorry, I meant signs on shops, like "Dry cleaning" or "Honda", etc.
I still disagree , I think it can be quite beneficial to use both methods simultaneously (and any other method that works, for that matter). I use various methods with my son and I don't notice any signs of him preferring one thing over another for the reasons of taking the easy way out, so to speak. I don't view memorisation of the word as "guessing". as I mentioned before, I think we actually naturally memorise many words and when we read them again in different contexts it doesn't mean that we are guessing them, it means that we have simply learned them in a different way. We recognise the word and know its' meaning and THAT is the main thing!
Just to give an example (I know it's not directly related but on one level I am talking from experience here) when I was learning English at 14 years of age I found transcription (writing out english words in special russian characters that represent sounds, similar to phonems) unbearable and learned most words by sight reading. A lot of the time, my spelling at school was better than that of my aussie classmates.

I assume you already knew how to read phonetically, however, just not in English - so the example isn't really representative.

Because sight reading does not work until you learn to break down words into parts rather than just a random jumble of letters. It may appear to work for a small vocabulary of words, and the appearance of being able to read may make a kid happy in the short term, but in the long term introducing sight reading before phonics is detrimental to learning to read with a large vocabulary. You have to be able to sound out a word if you can't remember what it is, unless you're one of of that very small minority of people with an eidetic memory, or unless you can't already speak the language (in which case sounding things out won't help much). Were you able to speak English before you learned to read it?

An overemphasis on sight reading is just one of the main reasons why the public school system is producing kids who can't read. This is one of those few instances where I'm just going to say a certain learning style is wrong, and you can agree or disagree with me from there as you wish.