Native Reading: How To Teach Your Child To Read, Easily And Naturally, Before The Age Of Three

by Timothy D. Kailing

Give your child the gift of early, effortless, and lifelong literacy. Teaching your child to be a native reader is a joyful, creative and social experience. The techniques of native reading structure just a small portion of your child's natural play, but with this structure, they do something the fundamental similarity of written and spoken language becomes apparent, even obvious, to a child. Reading is transformed into a spontaneous skill that children acquire effortlessly, as toddlers, in the course of their play. The benefits go far beyond simply reading early. When a child learns to read natively, deep neural connections are made between oral language and the written word. Reading is transformed into a less abstract and more natural skill. It becomes natively known, just as the ability to talk is known natively. A native reader has a mother tongue not only in the spoken language, but also, deeply, in the written language.

Genres: Parenting

180 pages, Paperback

First published March 5, 2008

Reviews

[Roy]

I don't think I'll be able to force myself to read this all the way through. This is definitely browse and highlight what you find most useful material. The fault is not so much with the author's writing ability as it is the fact that there's basically enough formation being provided to fill up a useful article, but since it has been made into a book instead, the author resorts to an astronomical amount of padding. The same exact point is repeated in as many different minutely different ways as possible to get the page count up to triple digits. This is not made any less annoying by the fact that just about one sentence per paragraph and a half needlessly ends with an exclamation point. So I cannot recommend this book as something to read for pleasure. This doesn't mean it will not ultimately prove to be a wonderful resource that delivers on its promise to teach a child under the age of 3 to read. If the techniques prove succesful perhaps I'll feel compelled at a later date to come back and improve my current rating. After all, I didn't buy this book to be entertained. I bought it to learn how to teach. But it would have been a nice bonus if the book was easier on the readability meter.

[Erin]

Native Reading is two books in one: the first part is an easy to read sort of how-to book describing the method the author used to teach both of his two babies/toddlers to read while he was a stay-at-home parent. The ideas make a whole lot of sense! The second book is the notes in the back, which are targeted at those who want a more in depth analysis and a glimpse into the theoretical background of neuroscience, cognition, learning algorithms, and the history of some of these ideas. A previous reviewer described the book as padded, but I think for some educators entrenched into the way we teach reading in our society, they may need to hear it frontwards, and backwards in order for it to make sense. Now all these little kids you see reading on YouTube can be seen not as rare geniuses, but rare examples of kids whose parents took advantage of any child's innate genius for learning language. Native speaker, native reader.

[Avery Kamenar]

Though this book only really needed to be one sentence (point at the words as you read them to your kid) I'm very grateful because despite its verbosity, I've got two boys who learned to read at the age of three, and my daughter coming down the pike. It's so simple but so effective. It's not the only technique I use in teaching my children to read, but it's definitely the biggest tool in the chest.

[Amanda]

The way it was written was okay, but the concept was fascinating! It sounds like his theory was only tried out on his two children but it makes a lot of sense. I was disappointed to hear that it might not work for those whose kids go to daycare, but still want to try the methodology out when we are home.

[Leslie]

I think the theory in this book is sound, but I think it could have been condensed into about 20 pages.