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them what you're doing. Introduce them to their relatives. Read to them
regularly. Above all, remember the importance of positive encouragement. If she says
"I goed to the store," don't tell her that's wrong. Instead, try: "You went
to the store, didn't you? And I went too. Tomorrow we'll go to the store again."
Again: make everything a fun language lesson by
introducing a subject, then turning it into a guessing game: "These are my eyes, and
this is my nose. Have you got eyes? Where are they? Have you got a nose? Where is
it?"
Nursery rhymes are great - simply because they do rhyme,
and rhymes are easy to remember. Every child should be exposed to colorful books from the
start - and should be read to regularly.
Says New Zealand reading expert and author Dorothy
Butler: "Keep the baby's books within reach, and make a practice of showing them to
her from the day you first bring her home. The covers will be brightly illustrated, and at
first you can encourage her to focus her eyes on these pictures. You can teach your baby a
lot about books in the first few months."16 Butler suggests showing even very
young babies successive pages of suitable books: "Babies need people: talking,
laughing, warm-hearted people, constantly drawing them into their lives, and offering them
the world for a playground. Let's give them books to parallel this experience; books where
language and illustration activate the senses, so that meaning slips in smoothly, in the
wake of feeling."
Learning to read should be a natural and
fun-filled process.
Again the principles are simple. English has about
550,000 words.17 But 2,000 to 3,000 words make up
90 percent of most speech.18 And only 400 to 450 words make up
65 percent of most books.19 Introduce those words to children
in a natural way, and reading develops as naturally as speaking. In fact the principle is
so simple it's amazing there is any debate. Words, like pictures, are only symbols of
reality. A picture of an apple is a symbol of a real fruit. So is the sound
"apple". And so is the written word "apple". So if children can hear
and see the word apple, and can taste it, smell it and touch it, they soon learn to speak
and read it.
Glenn Doman has been proving this since before he first
wrote Teach Your Baby To Read in 1964. He's also had many critics. Yet most of the
critics actually recommend many of the same techniques, and often they criticize Doman for
things he has never recommended.20
Says Doman: "It's as easy to learn to read as it
is to learn to talk. In
Contents Page Preface
Introduction
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