Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 14
 How to Teach Your Monkey Math May 12, 2009
P J K (Hong Kong)
6 out of 11 found this review helpful
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.
 A must read for all new parents May 11, 2009
Phyllis R. Craig (Chicagoland Area, IL USA)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is an awesome book, along with a companion book, How to Teach Your Baby to Read. I only wish we had had knowledge of this book and method when our children were babies 45-50 years ago. We're trying to spread the word to all we know about the gold that's hidden within it's covers.How To Teach Your Baby Math: The Gentle Revolution
...Bogus March 10, 2009
HarvardScientist (Boston, MA USA)
2 out of 6 found this review helpful
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.
Great Info for new parents October 15, 2008
Rosemarie Mahoney (Las Vegas)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
Great book March 20, 2008
NDPI (Crescent City, CA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Bought this book for my daughter to use in teaching her son. It is a great reference book.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 14
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