Your Baby Can Read

I just stumbled across this webpage today,via a video from a friend's page. Although there is definitely a product being advertised, I was blown away by what seems to be the ability of these children to recognize whole words...It reaffirmed my convinction that children--indeed human beings in general--have an amazing amount of potential in regard to learning and thinking.
The idea is that you can basically "teach your baby to read" and successfully introduce them to text far earlier than commonly thought possible. I read a criticism of the idea on another site, claiming that this method was simply memorization and that the children "weren't really reading." (the author seemed to be a fairly zealous proponent of the phonics-based approached to teaching.) I have to disagree. It seems to me that the best readers do see things as wholes and then proceed to break words and text down into parts. In fact, studies have shown that children much prefer to tackle something as a whole (think of child sitting at a typewriter....she doesn't want to learn each letter at first--she wants to type!) versus being spoon-fed each little detail until the original idea is forgotten in a sea of rules and regulations. We need the blue print before the boards. This is not to say that phonetics is unimportant. Just that perhaps it is out of its place in regard to teaching reading
To me, is essential to learning is getting an intuitive feel for what's going on. Think of it--when you try something new, let's say doing a complicated dive into a pool, isn't it nice to be alone, relaxed, and uninhibited at first? You can mess it up as badly as you'd like and it's okay. You know what the end result should be, so you begin seeing what does not match and correct from there. I'd say it's the same with language. Babies are constantly experimenting with sounds and words...how far would they get if we first attempted to "teach" them phonics without letting them explore the very feel of the thing itself? Let me know what you guys think.

Anyway, enough rambling, here is the link:http://www.blogger.com/i.g?inviteID=9046653743779013593&blogID=7941430063473835931

Also, a great deal of the thinking above is inspired and stolen from Mr. John Holt. He's written several great books. I have read How Children Learn and How Children Fail.