Given how much we bloggers like to write, it only stands to reason that we like to read too, and we want to encourage that love in our children as well. So it’s not surprising that seven of the ten bloggers who reviewed Your Baby Can Read, Volume 1 were on board to review Volume 2.

It’s been several months since that first campaign, and a few bloggers wrote about how their children’s verbal skills have evolved since then. One toddler has begun speech therapy, but “even without therapy, she’s been making great strides.” Another little guy has been “asking a lot of questions these days, only he doesn’t know how to form a question grammatically. He sort of makes a statement and inflects his voice at the end to indicate that he is asking something.” A third child - who’s not even eighteen months old yet - “seems to be following along with his eyes” when his parents read to him. Program or no program, it’s impressive to observe these sorts of changes.

The set includes a DVD and two sets of flash cards. One blogger had a tough time with one set of cards: “The second slide out card that I tried ripped. The third card I tried stuck, and I wasn’t able to get it back together…The two sided cards were preferred.” But another blogger and her daughter loved them: “I always said I wouldn’t be the mom with the flash cards, thinking it was a little too much, a little too rigid. Right. Never say never, because [my daughter] loves the flash cards even more than the DVDs. She continuously asks me if we can go through some of them and she enjoys trying to figure out what they say before I show her the corresponding picture.”

The DVD has helped expand the children’s vocabularies. One blogger commented, “I’ve really been impressed by how Volume 2 has helped her comprehend action verbs - a point of weakness that the therapists observed at her initial evaluation a couple months ago. She’s beginning to use those words now, whereas she previously stuck to the nouns-as-descriptors.” The blogger whose son is full of questions is starting to grasp sentence structure: “Throughout the video the narrators ask questions starting with Do you?, Have you? and Can you? These are things he needs to know how to say in order to form his questions and may not have been able to grasp the first time around.” So even though these toddlers may not necessarily be reading, they’re still absorbing the repetition of questions and actions in the video.

However engaging the DVD may be, it doesn’t necessarily appeal to all children. Try as she might, one blogger simply couldn’t interest her youngest children in the show for very long: “I started the DVD with my two non-readers. My youngest daughter has a mild form of autism, and she really liked the songs that were featured, as they are ones that she used in therapy, and we still sing them when we are doing therapy activities at home. She liked seeing the other children, but didn’t like when the words were shown on the screen. It interrupted the flow for her.” Another mother and her son enjoyed the DVD greatly, but don’t have the time to view it as often as the program’s creator recommends: “I work outside the home and one of the benefits of day care is that because he is learning when we are apart, the hours we spend together in the evenings and the weekends are more structured around play. I certainly am trying to incorporate learning into the time we spend together, but it’s not my first priority.”

Perhaps surprisingly, the most impressive success story from this initial group of reviews is that of the toddler who’s not yet eighteen months old:

“In some books that only have a line or two on each page, he will actually point to the words with his finger, kind of like how they do on the videos. I’ve tested him a few times by reciting the text from future pages before I actually turn to that page, and he will find the appropriate page for me. Also, he will often point insistently to a word he recognizes until I say it. Honestly, I find this nothing short of amazing.”

Given this mother’s fantastic experience with the program, it’s no wonder that she recommends it. “As a final testimonial as to how much we enjoy and utilize these DVDs, let me tell you that before PBN contacted me about reviewing the Volume 2 DVD, I had already ordered a copy at my own expense. That’s right folks, I was more than willing to part with my own dough in order to continue [my son] on this program.”

I don’t think that we can find a greater testimonial than that. But we’ve got five more reviews coming up, so check back to see what the next group of parents has to say about Your Baby Can Read, Volume 2.

Thurs 8/9 - Suburban Oblivion
Fri 8/10 - Mother Bumper
Mon 8/13 - Her Bad Mother
Tues 8/14 - Karianna
Wed 8/15 - Mama Drama Stephanie
Fri 8/17 - Round-Up Review on PBN