Customer Reviews

How To Teach Your Baby Math: The Gentle Revolution

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I was so lucky to read this book and 4 other books by the same author when my baby son was 9-mon, I spent 5 nights to read Doman's 5 books, and started to teach my son with Doman's method immediately. I started with 25 words and add 5 new words every day, 1 second per word, 3 times a day, same thing with 100 math dots cards. To my surprise, my son absorbed every thing so quickly and after 3 weeks, he started pointing to the right objects so often when I showed him the word!

I attended Dr. Doman's "How to multiply your baby's intelligence" baby brain development course in his "The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential" in Philadelphia in order to meet those experts and little geniuses in person. The Institute is for both well babies and brain injured babies, which was founded by Doman 50 years ago. It is a non-profit organization. ([...])

We saw all those 4-6 year-old kids and other 8-12 year-olds in their Institutes could read more than 3 languages, read many big thick books, do Math, science and encyclopedia, gymnastics, swim, play violin in almost professional high level!!! They were taught by their parents who most of them did not have any foreign languages and musical background and etc. Everybody in the class was astonished, thrilled and speechless; many were cried in the very formal graduation ceremony.

I started teaching my son reading when he was 9 months old. And the result was amazing. Three weeks later he could point to his name word when I say his name; and point to my bellybutton when I showed him the big word card: bellybutton. However, he lost interest of reading completely in 2 months when he can walk around. I had to stop my teaching for a while and search for methods that can intrigue his interest.

When he turned 18 months old, he can accurately name and read every part of the world map puzzle, he can read all other body and organ parts words and flower/tree parts words and other 1,000 words cards. When he is 21 months old, he can read dozens of children books. Now my son is 25 months old, I am starting teaching him the elementary curriculum for 10 to 20 minutes every day.

My son is just an ordinary child, if you think he is a GENIUS, then every baby is a GENIUS including your baby, as stated in Doman's theory, because every baby is able to read and do math if you prepare such an environment and opportunity for him to learn. And babies love to learn, it is fun and it is their surviving skill...

You do not need a college degree to be able to send your child to college or even Harvard, the love with all your heart to your child makes the real difference when you decide not taking the chance of winning a baby Einstein lottery that might be related to your family Genius Gene. Every hard effort you put to your baby, God knows, and your child knows.

Do not waste your baby's precious first 6 genius years! I highly recommend this book!

It might be too overwhelmed to spend weeks to cut and write hundreds of words cards and math cards, you can buy a set of "Teach your baby to read within one year kit" for $9.99 on eBay. You can type the keyword "Teach Your Baby to Read within 1 Year Kit / Montessori" on eBay to search for the kit and the relevant subjects' material.

You will see the light BEHIND their eyes when you start the sessions. My twins start twitching with excitement - literally - when they see me reach for the cards. Do what the book says, make it FUN for them and don't turn into a psycho-nut parent, and it will be fabulous. Do my 11 month olds know how to count? Who knows (Doman discourages "testing" them!), and I don't care. I know they're paying attention, and I can see their eyes absorbing information. He's right - kids are desperate to learn, ALL the time. Here is a structured way to help them do it. (Make it easy on yourself and buy the cards from them with the dots already printed.)

I read the book and found it to be quite fascinating. I've read all of Glenn Doman's and Janet Doman's books (they are father and daughter, btw). A lot of people might not think that 'tiny babies' can learn by showing dots but it's true. Not only 'tiny babies', but toddlers too. After a certain age though, kids just won't get the dots concept because they've been exposed to numerals so you have to weight that together. The Doman's have done fascinating work with Brain Injured children's parents and have used this concept of teaching math as well as their other early learning concepts. Many people have ripped them off over the years -- they've been around for over 50 years -- but the Doman's remain committed to their mission and not to the dollar. If you want to learn more, go to their website -- www.iahp.org. If you love this book or their other books and want to do more, you can! Take control of your child's early learning. It is possible and while this book may not give you the 20 steps to make a math genius, it DOES WORK!

Doman's books are a must read. I already suggested that one should start with How to Teach Your Baby to Read, because it has the philosophical underpinnings of their theory, but that book is a little time consuming to implement because you have to write words in a cardboard (see cover).
How to Teach Math should be the second, but it is much easier to implement the program because you can purchase an inexpensive kit from the author's institute (see cover).
I also recommend you to take the author's courses, in Philadelphia, but they are a couple of thousand dollars or more. Do it all before your baby is born.
I read How to Multiply your Baby's Intelligence 10 years before my wife got pregnant and it changed my life... and my daughter's (I hope). It changed how I saw child's development. Now she is 3.
But don't get too carried away. Believe me, some parents do get carried away. The ones in Philadelphia seem to belong to a sect. Just enjoy your children and add this program to the fun.
Although I spend a large amount of money with the course, I really don't do much of the program. Still, I raise my daughter differently from what I would otherwise have done without having read this book or taken the course. You will not be the same person after you read it. And it is not about teaching your baby to read. It is about learning how to teach your baby about life.
You will have more respect for your child and will not let your baby grow "by accident." Instead, you will be able to actively participate in the learning process and challenge your child to fulfill his or her intellectual potential. If you have a child, or if you don't but you love someone, this is the only book that you must read. Remember, read it before the baby is born. This collection is a wonderful present for an expecting mother.

Another great title by Glenn Doman that helps parents to focus on their children. Helps parents think of their children in new ways and changes what is possible because it changes our assumptions about our children. Reading and using the techniques in the Doman books gives
children a head start on learning to love learning.

I hated math after 6th grade and didn't want my 16 month old son to 'catch' my frustration. I taught my son math so easily. His favorite subject is math!

How To Teach Your Baby Math: The Gentle Revolution

That book was a big waste of time and money. I bought it hoping to find something interesting, but instead this just confirmed what I knew about the author.

What a shame to see Glenn Doman capitalizing on the back of gullible and uninformed parents. His theories have been debunked long ago. Here is a statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics stated in 1968, 1982 AND 1999: "The use of flash cards is based on the theory of "Psychomotor Patterning" by Glenn Doman, which is NOT theoretically proven to be valid"

What has been proven is that children (and even adults) can't make an instant estimate of quantities above 8 to 10 units. Frenetically flashing cards with 40 dots in front of your kid does nothing but entertain him by a looney parent making funny faces and caring for them (the good part). Doman's "whole word" flashcards language methods are equally as bad. In case you still haven't noticed everywhere around you, the best way to learn English is Phonics.

Doman is right about one thing, the learning power of young children is greatly underestimated. You can use his book if you want to teach your Monkey math, or you could get some apples and oranges and teach your baby about the real world and quantities around them.

Awesome....Kids are sponges. This teaches you precisely how to help your child learn math as far as you want to take them(add, sub, mult, square roots, ect.) There is no limit on age or when to begin. It is fun, focused and accomplished in just seconds or a couple minutes a day!! No JOKE. I used it with my babies and toddlers. It's easy because it teaches you how the child's developing mind learns and then tells you how to use these simple concepts to teach them. They loved it. Us moms love it because it works and they love it!!

Babies don't come with instructions so every piece of information helps,
what I learned in this book applies to many areas of every day teaching, learning and understanding. Short enough to find time to read, and interesting.

If you are trying to transform your kid into some precocious and burnt out counting monkey (with no guarantee to succeed, by the way) buy this book...no, actually, don't, it's a big waste of time and you may even risk to harm your baby mind in the process!

I was searching for a manual describing intelligent methods to stimulate my newborn kid creativity and abstract thinking, the basis for mathematical thinking and much more, and I run into Dr. Doman's book. I am not a fan of this kind of books, but I learned about his commendable activity with brain injured kids (that is an area where Dr. Doman may have more credibility and likely stands on more solid grounds, it seems) and thought to give a try at his approach to early math education.

It was a total disappointment. As other have pointed out, the style of writing is repetitions and boring, but I can live with that, the target reader has probably a wide range of education backgrounds. What he has to say could be easily condensed in one page, but worse, the method he proposes sounded totally bogus since the get-go. He tries to teach kids from 6 mo to 2 years age numbers and calculations using dozens of flash cards with bright red dots shown to the baby at a fast rate as the stepping stone to more complex tasks. In the end visual/auditory memorization and repetition seem to be the key factors in this approach. For a few kids this method seems to produce the expected result, but my question is: do we really want or need that result? fast counting monkeys no more intelligent than the next kid playing with wood blocks and crayons? From my independent assessment of his methods, I understand that there is no research whatsoever supporting his claims, at best some anecdotical data exist from the teaching in his expensive courses at the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential. It seems to me that the most likely outcome will be boring your infant to death, followed on the extreme by transforming her/him into a counting machine who will likely hate science, math, and probably you, for the rest of her adult life. Dr. Hirsh-Pasek book "Einstein Never Used Flashcards" pushes this conclusion (that book seems a better investment, at least she cites some technical literature), much research on young kids' education seems to indicate that capacity for abstraction matures around 5-6 years of age (it is no chance that that is the normal school age across the entire planet!) and that kids pushed into being home-made precocious geniuses may be less creative, curious and flexible later in life. Who wants that? Before you consider buying this book, take time to read this article:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2007/10/28/rush_little_baby/

That alone would have saved me a few bucks. My current personal conclusion is that creative play, parental engagement, talking and reading (anything!) to your kids are better bets for growing creative and curious individuals ready to operate in the economy of tomorrow. bottom line, I consider this purchase my personal charity to Dr. Doman other's endeavors...no more than that.