Throughout the reviews of Your Baby Can Read, Volume 2, I’ve been most struck by how much the kids adore this program - DVD and flash cards alike. One little girl (who’s not yet two years old) “loves this DVD. LOVES. As in loves it so much that she asks for it by name - baby read? Peez?…She shouts along as words are read - COW! CUP! HAT! - and then sings and dances when the songs come on.” Another one, who is just past her first birthday, “likes the flash cards. To her, it is a really fun game to go through them, and her attention span allows her to use them for up to 30 minutes at a time.” A little guy who has a big brother “opened the flash cards, and [his brother] immediately provided the answers. Unfazed, [he] took the sliding flashcards, turning his back on [his brother] so that he could try them himself.”

As before, the DVD was a big hit with both parents and kids. One blogger stated that: “[My daughter] loves the songs (Old MacDonald, Itsy Bitsy Spider, and I’m a Little Teapot) and she loves watching the children and animals. I love that there are no commercial characters, it is not too fast paced, and I especially love the way [my daughter] and I have fun yelling out the words with (or before) the pronunciation voice-over.” Another commented, “I have to say this was the most truly interactive video, ever. It kept them watching and participating through the entire 30 minutes.” She went on to note that the DVD has also functioned as “a wonderful speech therapy tool! My four year old has verbal apraxia, and has been in speech therapy for nearly two years. It has become second nature for us to incorporate sounding out words and having him repeat things in our day to day life, and this has become a wonderful supplement to that. When the narrator reads a word on the screen, my son will immediately repeat it back, and with him, repetition is key.”

The sliding flash cards were also a useful tool. One blogger described how her son used the cards: “When horse appeared on the screen, he grabbed the horse flashcard, said horse! and looked back at the DVD to watch the horse on-screen and to listen to the associated sentence. He did the same thing with duck, and several other words. I was surprised at how instantly he found the flashcard given that I would have assumed he’d have little recognition yet for the written word.” Even for younger children, the flash cards were an enjoyable supplement. “It was very easy to engage [my daughter] in the sliding cards but the word-only cards didn’t interest her…The sliding cards are superior to any other flash cards I have tried, and [she] is game for playing with them any time.” Another blogger did have some trouble with one of the cards, but used the rest of them easily: “They are very durable, but one of them stuck for us, and I still do not know what the horse looks like, as we’ve not been able to open at that card at all. Other cards had minor sticking that we were able to open without breaking, and overall I thought they were well-made.”

Does this program push kids to do too much, too soon? One mother doesn’t think so (and she went to battle with one of her commenters on that point): “I do believe that the earlier she reads, the sooner she is exposed to the great big world of books, and that can only mean good things. I am certainly going to buy the rest of the program for her.”

Are the kids really reading, or are they just having fun? One mother sees the fun as an essential precursor to a love of reading: “She throws her little self right into the fun of shouting words and singing words and dancing to words and - yes - learning words (many of which she can now recognize). But what’s most important about this, I think, is not the learning so much as it is the passion-building…Loving words - thinking that words are fun - is the first and most important step to loving reading and books and all the wonderful things that words make.”

In summary, “How can something so much fun be rote?”

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