When Should We Start Teaching Our Children To Read?

"During infancy, children learn language skills faster and easier than at any other time in their lives. I developed this new multi-sensory reading approach to take advantage of this window of opportunity."
- Robert C. Titzer, Ph.D

Dr. Titzer has developed a new method of teaching reading that could change how and when our children learn to read. Normally, children don't start learning to read until the age of 5 or 6 years. However, waiting until 5 or 6 is based on our history of being an agrarian society and it ignores the "window of opportunity" for learning language which appears to begin closing around the age of 4.
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A National Crisis:

40% of eight-year-olds in the U.S. cannot read on their own.

"Of those children who cannot read at the end of 1st grade, fewer than 1 in 8 will ever catch up to their peers to read at their grade level, research shows. Instead, they drop out of school at higher rates than their classmates."
- Nathan Seppa, APA Monitor

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Solution:

We need to start exposing our children to words and language much earlier.

Parents need to be actively involved in educating their children.

Dr. Titzer's research suggests that infants and toddlers can learn to read using a multi-sensory approach where they see written words at the same time they hear the words. He also suggests that the child do some physical activity related to the words. This should allow more connections in the brain among the visual, auditory, and somatosensory areas of the brain according to the latest theories
of brain development.