"Mommy, that looks like tiger"

I was reading Guess How Much I Love You to Caroline before bed last week and she pointed to the word "tight" on the page and said "Mommy, that looks like tiger." I was pretty blown away that she recognized the similarity between the words. We started doing the Your Baby Can Read program with her sometime last winter (although not as consistently as we would like or as the program recommends). Tiger is one of the words that is taught in the first few segments of the series, and she clearly knows that t-i-g are letters in the word tiger.


I have to admit, I was skeptical of the Your Baby Can Read program. I laughed when Chris told me that he had ordered it. I'm sure you have seen the infomercial on TV. His point was that it only cost like 100 bucks, so it wasn't a big investment if it didn't work. Anyway, when the box arrived, we both started reading about the theory behind the program, which is basically that there is a small window of time in very early childhood when the brain has the greatest potential for language development and that this window of time is much earlier than reading is typically taught in school. It also points out that reading to your child doesn't actually teach them to read (a statement that seems obvious when you think about it, but something I had never really given much thought to). So, we have sporadically used the program over the past 6-9 months with Caroline, and I can definitely see that it works.