maia

I have been teaching my oldest son to read with Anki and techniques recommended here on LessWrong as well as in Larry Sanger's post, and it's going great! I thought I'd pay it forward a bit by talking about the techniques I've been using. Anki and songs for letter names and sounds When he was a little under 2, he started learning letters from the alphabet song. We worked on learning the names and sounds of letters using the ABC song, plus the Letter Sounds song linked by Reading Bear. He loved the Letter Sounds song, so we listened to / watched that a lot; Reading Bear has some other resources that other kids might like better for learning letter names and sounds as well. Around this age, we also got magnet letters for the fridge and encouraged him to play with them, praised him greatly if he named them or made their sound pointing at them, and played with them ourselves to show him. I think this was somewhat helpful. We also tried the first Your Baby Can Read video (the first one is available for free on YouTube), but it didn't seem all that helpful and the further ones were very expensive so I dropped that. At some point we started doing Anki flashcards for each letter. I tried for a while to find a premade Anki deck and then just gave up and made cards myself. The AnkiDroid app actually makes this very easy to do on your phone. The letters it displays are very small, so instead of using those, I used the "Draw" functionality to just draw a big colorful version of each letter with my finger, then I put a picture of something with that letter (preferably with the simple phonetic version of the letter-- eg A should be "apple" not "ape"; X should be "box" or "fox" not "xylophone") on the other side of the card. To get him more excited about it, I also recorded myself saying the name and sound of the letter, and tried to find words with each letter that he'd be most excited about-- he loves animals, so mostly this meant including animals as much as possible. For s