Disney Finally Concedes Implicitly - the Baby Einstein Videos and CD's Don't Work!

Awww.... just hang on to them. In another 10 years "they'll" start saying that by not letting babies watch TV that we're denying them a rich, multi-faceted, cultural environment necessary for learning, socializing and great success in life -- or something like that. Your video will be worth a fortune.

Yeah but no one will have video players any more.... at least I can get a couple of bucks for it - if I still have the damn thing - I might have given it away as we never even opened it.

Can You Make Your Baby Smarter, Sooner?

NPR's Talk of the Nation tackles the subject quite well. But that's par for the course.

HOST:
Neal Conan;

GUESTS:
Jon Hamilton, science correspondent, NPR
David Elkind, professor emeritus of child development at Tufts University
Janet Doman, director of the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential



http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114247630

Thanks for the link, that was interesting.

This



...is a fight I continue to have with Mo's school. I feel that more than teaching him to read, they're teaching him to hate to read.

Have you tried comic books? (er... graphic novels?)

He doesn't seem to like them much.

The problems is -- the stories he likes are written above his grade level. The things he can read bore him. The things I read with/to him, he loves -- he'd do this all day long. We read together a lot.

He reads just a fraction below grade level which, in third grade, due to NCLB, is a big problem. He has some developmental delays. I firmly believe that he'll catch up when it's appropriate for him. In the meantime I read him "Ten True Tales: WW2 Heros" and the school gets pissed off about it.

How sad.

I expect you're already trying the few strategies that I can think of....

The whole concept of teaching children to excel at standardized testing is absolutely flawed. That's one reason I jumped ship from my education minor during my first attempt at college.






boomerang
Either your instinct or you're filtering out the right messages from whatever media sources you've been exposed, you assessment of your own child seems to be quite intuitive and dead on the target. It's a damn shame that the school system doesn't realize that your seemingly circuitous route to getting Mo up to speed on his ability to read and love doing it at the same time is the best way to help Moe academically. It's not like what you're doing is an alien practice. At least in an anecdotal sense, I heard this dozens and dozens of times, regarding the slow start of boys learning to read. The fact that he's a captivated audience when you are reading with him? That's a definitely sunny sign that he'll become an avid reader when the reading skills he WILL eventually learn will come to him.

My only caveat to my above statement is that perhaps you should make due care to rule out any ... reading disabilities Mo might have. Either way, keep reading to him.

I'm not the least bit worried about him; Mo will do just fine.

The school wants him dianosed with ADD so they pooh-pooh the diagnosis we received from a incredible child development clinic at a nationally regarded children's hospital.

Anyway.... I've been "invited" to "join" the faculty at a "team meeting" to determine the course of Mo's education.

That's an invitation I will most assuredly be accepting!

Life in the real world trenches with a less than stellar student makes things like wanting your Baby Einstein money back because it didn't make your baby smarter kinda funny.