The recent exposing of the Your Baby Can Read product raises awareness to some fundamental flaws in teaching/training children.
The program, which boasted a success rate based on research that frankly never happened, is a result of sequencing.
Children are sponges. Some are brilliant enough to comprehend the training at an earlier age than most, but many are merely mimicking a pattern. Horses can be trained to "count", which usually means they can remember pictures and follow verbal and nonverbal cues to respond to a command as opposed to answering questions.
A way to ensure you are not simply teaching a parlor trick to your child is to make a relationship between the information and its application.
I use flashcards to teach my daughter numbers. I also make her count objects. She doesnt count large numbers of objects since we work with 1-20, but she understands she has 2 shoes, or 3 rocks. She understands a $20 bill is more than a $1 bill (and she will ask for a $20 bill).
Letters are a different battle. I would like to teach her phonics, since that was the method I learned to read with, but I dont know if she has the focus to learn phonics as of yet. Without phonics, letters are just pictures, and picture reading is reading without comprehension.
This is Realest Mother Dearest signing off.
