Learning To Read: How Young is Too Young ?

Learning to Read: How Young is Too Young?Huffington Post: 5.12.11 by Lisa Guernsey

Should reading be taught in first grade or in kindergarten?
Maybe preschool?
How about even younger?

Most literacy researchers agree that there's a limit to how young you can go and that in infancy and toddlerhood it makes no sense to try to start formal reading instruction. Don't tell that to Janet Doman, director of a small organization called the Institutes for Achievement of Human Potential in Philadelphia. Doman is trying to spread the idea that the process of learning to read can start in babyhood.

She suggests that parents train their babies by holding up cards with words written in large letters while speaking the words. Her father, Glenn Doman, is the Institutes' founder and co-author of a decades-old, self-published book, How to Teach Your Baby to Read.

To serious researchers, the Domans' ideas are disturbingly devoid of any basis in mainstream science and appear to rely entirely on anecdotal evidence. Yet among many parents and some childcare providers, the notion of very early reading is taking hold nevertheless.

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Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff, two nationally recognized developmental psychologists who co-wrote, with Diane Eyer, the acclaimed book Einstein Never Used Flashcards, have been urging parents to recognize the simple power of conversational moments with young children instead of drilling them on vocabulary words. READ MORE !