Kindergarten is too Late to start reading, Kids are much smarter than we give them credit for!

"How To Teach Your Baby To Read" by Janet Doman:

{ Link }

Thanks for the info on Janet Doman. I have also found early reading stuff that my 20 month granddaughter is crazy about at www.infantlearning.com.

A wonderful vocabulary and early reading CD produced by a Scott Yang, a pediatrition/father, called Dada DaVinci comes with options for the audio in any combination of seven languages including Mandarin Chinese.

These early learning products have fired my interest in how we learn and my desire to learn more.

On your recommendation I looked into this for my 5 year old son and it seems good. We did the 3 trials lesssons today so I was going to purchase the product and use your promo code "davidco" but it tells me the following:

"We're sorry, but the code you entered was valid for a limited number of learners who have already been enrolled. Please contact Headsprout at info@headsprout.com to add learners to your account. The code field needs to contain a valid code or be left blank in order to proceed."

I was wondering if you could do anything about this ie help me get the 10% discount. I realize this is not your problem but it does make me feel a little suspect about the company when they don't honor the promo code that you put on your blog.

By the way I enjoy reading your blog and thanks for covering far reaching topics such as this.

Sincerely,
Paul

[I let Greg know about the discount expiration, and here's what he sent me today (06/12/2005) - DA]

"David,

I've just checked and extended the number of learners who can take advantage of the "davidco" promo code. I was surprised your network of folks ran into the initial limit. Word-of-mouth for Headsprout's reading program continues to grow.

For example, here's a recent note we received from a home user in Ohio:
"I'm not a great one for words but nothing stops me from telling others with young children to go to the Headsprout site for themselves and at the very least try the sample lessons. There is no way that I can tell them how great the lessons are - they just have to trust me and try it out. Not one of the people who looked didn't sign up. Not one came back with bad reviews. Not one."

Headsprout reading programs are now being used in schools, learning centers, and homes across the country. Because of our generative Sprout Learning Technology, Headsprout's learning outcomes are unparalleled. We are still the only company to offer schools a money-back guarantee if students do not meet or exceed grade level reading. And we still have not been asked for any money back.

Your network of friends and contacts should now be able to continue receiving a discount for Headsprout when they sign up with the "davidco" code.

Best regards,

Greg" -

Greg Stikeleather
President & CEO
Headsprout
www.headsprout.com
Where kids learn to read!

Hello,
This is Tara host of Profiles on TalktoTara.com. I want to mention that I am the person who interviewed Janet Doman on her book "Teach Your Baby To Read." I am glad that Mr. Solomon put up a link so all who visit this page may have the opportunity to hear our interview. All material on TalktoTara.com is copyrighted though, and he really should have put this link in his posting instead (or click on my name.)Thank you for listening!

http://talktotara.com/psychology.php#janet_doman

Dr. Alison Gopnik has a science based view here:
http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_9.html
"I believe, but cannot prove, that babies and young children are actually more conscious, more vividly aware of their external world and internal life, than adults are. I believe this because there is strong evidence for a functional trade-off with development. Young children are much better than adults at learning new things and flexibly changing what they think about the world. On the other hand, they are much worse at using their knowledge to act in a swift, efficient and automatic way. They can learn three languages at once but they can't tie their shoelaces.

This trade-off makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Our species relies more on learning than any other, and has a longer childhood than any other. Human childhood is a protected period in which we are free to learn without being forced to act. There is even some neurological evidence for this. Young children actually have substantially more neural connections than adults—more potential to put different kinds of information together. With experience, some connections are strengthened and many others disappear entirely. As the neuroscientists say, we gain conductive efficiency but lose plasticity.

What does this have to do with consciousness? Consider the experiences we adults associate with these two kinds of functions. When we know how to do something really well and efficiently, we typically lose, or at least, reduce, our conscious awareness of that action. We literally don't see the familiar houses and streets on the well-worn route home, although, of course, in some functional sense we must be visually taking them in. In contrast, as adults when we are faced with the unfamiliar, when we fall in love with someone new, or when we travel to a new place, our consciousness of what is around us and inside us suddenly becomes far more vivid and intense. In fact, we are willing to expend lots of money, and lots of emotional energy, for those few intensely alive days in Paris or Beijing that we will remember long after months of everyday life have vanished.

Similarly, as adults when we need to learn something new, say when we learn to skydive, or work out a new scientific idea, or even deal with a new computer, we become vividly, even painfully, conscious of what we are doing—we need, as we say, to pay attention. As we become expert we need less and less attention, and we experience the actual movements and thoughts and keystrokes less and less. We sometimes say that adults are better at paying attention than children, but really we mean just the opposite. Adults are better at not paying attention. They're better at screening out everything else and restricting their consciousness to a single focus. Again there is a certain amount of brain evidence for this. Some brain areas, like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, consistently light up for adults when they are deeply engaged in learning something new. But for more everyday tasks, these areas light up much less. For children, though the pattern is different—these areas light up even for mundane tasks.

I think that, for babies, every day is first love in Paris. Every wobbly step is skydiving, every game of hide and seek is Einstein in 1905.

The astute reader will note that this is just the opposite of what Dan Dennett believes but cannot prove. And this brings me to a second thing I believe but cannot prove. I believe that the problem of capital-C Consciousness will disappear in psychology just as the problem of Life disappeared in biology. Instead we'll develop much more complex, fine-grained and theoretically driven accounts of the connections between particular types of phenomenological experience and particular functional and neurological phenomena. The vividness and intensity of our attentive awareness, for example, may be completely divorced from our experience of a constant first-person I. Babies may be more conscious in one way and less in the other. The consciousness of pain may be entirely different from the consciousness of red which may be entirely different from the babbling stream of Joyce and Woolf."
-Dr. Alison Gopnik
http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_9.html
See her research here:
http://ihd.berkeley.edu/gopnik.htm

Trialing Headsprout has been on my @ Home list since the original blog entry. Finally the time was "right" as a special summer project with my 4 1/2 year old. She couldn't be happier and sees (by the way she learned see in lesson one)her "reading lesson" as a reward each evening while dad watches the news.

Just excellent programming and she now recognizes 4 words after 3 lessons. Needless to say we signed up for the full package which is 80 lessons. What a wonderful summer treat for us all. I can't wait to see what she accomplishes.