Monday, March 10, 2008

17-Month Old Toddler Learns to Read


On the Today Show, a 17-month old toddler was shown reading off words like "kangaroo" and sentences like "Nice to meet you." The parents are both speech therapists who signed with their baby when she was younger. The video, unfortunately as usual, isn't captioned but you can see the mom signing in parts of it:

The Today Show


This brought back memories when my kids were little. I loved watching their signs emerge when they were toddlers. They learned their ABCs through fingerspelling. I would often fingerspell words in the bathtub along with the sponge ABCs that we stuck to the wall. Of course, the closed-captioning on the tv helped to speed along their reading skills. I'm a big fan of using all kinds of ways to get language going with kids.

And way off the subject, I'm in second place for the SOBCon contest! One click from you can send me off to the SOBCon!

Click here to send Karen to the SOBCon.

12 comments:

i am myles said...

i think its freakin AMAZING that a 17
month old toddler knows how to read. he must like a child prodigy or something (*_*).
your child is going to do great things!!

god bless

Anonymous said...

Oh my gosh, Karen -- thank you for posting. Love that she's a signing baby -- so much for the argument that ASL stunts speech development!!!


Now I'm going to have to have a long discussion with my 2YO about why she's eating our Shakespeare collection instead of reading like she ought to be :) !!

Karen Putz said...

Shakespeare is a tough one to swallow! LOL

Anonymous said...

Oh ... !

I wish I could claim I had knowingly set you up for that truly elegant, rim shot-worthy line! Very nicely done.

Unknown said...

Learning is always an ongoing activities in our brains. We will learn and this proves it. Thanks for sharing.

Jim

J.J. said...

Opps sorry, you beat me to it....(made a blog about it...oh well)

Anonymous said...

Here's a clip:

Husband:
We tried to do everything we could to stimulate her language growth.

From day 1, Katie has been using sign language with her.


Today Show:
Sign language? Do you think that helped in some way?

Husband:
We do, we think anything related to language is a good thing to nurture, ....

Anonymous said...

We love "Signing Time" as it helps to teach my twins how to say the word and signs.

The other day my daughter, Rianna signed dog! Because she saw a picture of a dog at the store. She's only 17 months old. I was surprised! I can't wait to buy some more collection of "ST".

I highly recommend parents to buy them.

Candace said...

I think I'm going to try the signing with my son. I'd lie to learn it too. a friend told me about some dvd's to get started so I have to just find them now on amazon. I saw the baby on the today show. amazing.

Anonymous said...

Hey, I really like that colored poster shown here for signing. My daughter loves to learn to sign letters (8yr old, not deaf) but wants to learn it. She's bored with the old black and white paper she uses. Where can those be found?
--Merry

Karen Putz said...

Hi Merry,
I've had that in my hard drive for many years and I can't even remember where I got it from. Sorry I'm not more help!

Happy Elf Mom (Christine) said...

Hello! Found you through the autism linky thing. I know about four sign words. I just started teaching them to my 16-month-old who refuses to talk. :[

I'm not understanding why he won't talk because he should have been doing that long ago. My older son Patrick says, notice he only really says VOWEL sounds? Strange! Who would think a kid could develop a consonant-aversion at such a young age??

But now the baby can point and say "please" and sometimes "more."

No reading yet though LOL!! I saw that show, too, and thought it was amazing!! Hopefully they don't push the kid to early burnout, but she is very talented and blessed.

I enjoyed stopping by your blog and sharing your world for a few minutes. :]