How to Teach Your Baby to Read

By Adwina D. Jackson

Teaching your baby to read? You probably think it's ludicrous. A baby reads? How come?

Well, the answer is: yes, it's possible. You may not realize that babies are smarter than we imagine.

They develop miraculously. Starting from the moment of birth, babies learn to cry and adapt to their atmosphere. They cry when they're hungry or uneasy with the clothes parents put on them.

Later on when they get older, children absorb a lot of information and perform unexpected, funny things we've never thought they would do. And they get the knowledge by reading.

Here's the secret, actually. And indeed, it's the secret which Glenn Doman found out throughout his researches. He believes that parents can teach their babies to read at a very young age, even before they reach the first year of life.





Who is Glenn Doman?

He established The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential in 1955 and began to set up researches about children's brain.

The Institutes, according to the website (www.iahp.org), is the nonprofit educational organization that serves parents and children. It introduces parents to the field of child brain development. Parents learn how the brain grows and how to speed and enhance that growth.

The key to this is to give children visual, auditory, and tactile stimulation with increased frequency, intensity, and duration.

In his book, How to Teach Your Baby to Read, Doman proves how easy it is to teach children to read and how powerful the benefits of reading in early childhood are both for parents and children.

"Reading" to babies here means to stimulate visual ability and not to understand the words and to state them verbally.




What is This Glenn Doman Method?

It's teaching babies to read by the following steps:

Write one word in big clear letters on one firm white paper

Categorize words in several groups, such as color, fruit, and animal

Put at least five words for each category, for example red, blue, yellow, green, black (first group) and apple, banana, tomato, orange, strawberry (second group)

Read the words in clear loud voice

Read three categories in one day

Do it three times a day for each group

Create other categories for the days to come and repeat the above steps

Those are the steps of one-word teaching. The next ones are: two-word lesson (red book, long time), simple sentence lesson (daddy is writing, jimmy is running), long sentence lesson (michael is eating a green apple, the kid is sitting on the couch), and the last one is reading books.

Remember that you shouldn't perform this process if you and your babies are not in good condition. Make sure your babies aren't hungry or tired at that moment. You have to be cheerful during the time.




Your babies may not be able to read or understand those words yet, but they keep the information in their memory, in the brain, which absorbs any information like a sponge.

Once they can speak, be ready with the way they bombard you with endless vocabulary.

Besides enhancing your babies' intelligence, of course there are other benefits of teaching your baby to read. It creates a special, intimate bond with your babies, develops their imagination, and establishes reading and learning as interests all through your kids' life.

Cherish every moment with your loved ones!

Adwina Jackson is a wife and mother of a young boy. She's also the editor of Inspiring Parenting, an online source of valuable parenting information. Please visit http://www.inspiringparenting.com/ for helpful and free parenting info. Observe your children's health, growth and development by clicking the website.