Amazing Videos of a Toddler Reading Books
Prepare to be Impressed!
If you've browsed around on our website here, you'll no doubt have seen some of the many videos that I've posted showing my young children reading at different ages. Here, I have two videos showing another 2 year 4 months old toddler reading story books! Believe it or not...
This little guy's name is Jacob, and he's actually my little nephew. He lives in California with his parents (we're in Vancouver). I had given my sister-in-law (Jacob's mom) a copy of my reading program - for her to teach the little guy to read when she felt he was ready. She began teaching him to read when he was almost two years old - spending just a few minutes a day working on our reading lessons. By age 2, he was already sounding out and decoding simple 3 and 4 letter words.
About 3 months later, she sent me 2 videos of Jacob reading short story books at just 2 years 4 months old! He is reading, and he is reading phonetically! Here's the first video:
Watching that video, you'll notice that because of his young age, Jacob is not speaking perfectly clear, yet, and the baby slurs are still evident. However, there can be no question about his amazing phonetic reading skills! By the way, did I mention that he's only 2 years 4 months old?
Here's the second video showing him reading "Time for Bed".
With these toddler reading videos, there's no gimmick or trickery involved - there's certainly no memorization, but real phonetic reading by the youngster. This is clearly demonstrated in situations where he runs into words that give him a little difficulty, and his mom asks him to "sound it out" to properly decode and read it - something you won't see with children who "read" by memorizing word shapes.
We teach real phonetic reading.
A Tale of Two Cousins - A Few Thousand Miles Apart
As mentioned above, we live in Vancouver, and Jacob's family lives in California. Indeed, he's reading simple story books at just 2 years old.
Now we turn to one of my little niece (grade 1), that also live in Vancouver. When she was younger we offered to teach her to read, as she and her mom (another sister-in-law) live very close to us. For whatever reasons, her mom decided to let the education system teach her to read, and we respect her decision.
Unfortunately, many (if not most) of the schools in our city teach children to read through the sight words method - "shape memorization" as I like to call it. In grade 1, each week, my niece receives a list of 5 words from her class teacher and she must "learn" those 5 words. So, she has learned to memorize several dozen words; however, she does NOT understand the mechanics of phonetic reading, and is at a complete loss when she encounters words she's never seen before - I guess you could say "shapes that she's never seen before".
Contrast that with her 2 year old cousin, who already knows how to read phonetically, has learned the real mechanics of reading and decoding, and knows how to "figure out" what an unfamiliar word is through phonics and phonetics.
Now, which method would you rather use, to teach your child to read? Would you prefer to teach your child how to decode and read through learning phonics and developing phonemic awareness or would you rather have your child try to memorize the shapes of hundreds (even thousands) of words without ever really developing a real understanding of why words sound the way they do?
If you would like to teach your child to read and help your child develop an amazing foundation in reading, please click here to learn more about our super effective, simple, and systematic reading program that will teach your child to become an amazing reader.
