wenjongal,

That post was very good too. They definetly have very good information in that website and they do carrie some interesting products if you want to expose your child to Chinese.

aangeles,

I'm not sure if they offer this products in traditional chinese. Maybe you can contat them through the blog and if they don't offer them, they may be able to point you in the right direction. I have not checked the baby learns chinese videos. Right now we are using wink to learn, but honestly I'm not sure how much my dd has learned since she doesn't talk yet. I'm hoping that this exposure will help her with her acent later on when we can put her in Mandarin classes.

I found this blog that has very intereSting information about teaching Chinese to children. http://www.poppingpandas.com/pandablog.html

This specific post had very good information:

Here are some basic guidelines for children under eight:

• Always remember that your goal is to help your child fall in love with learning Chinese. He or she has the opportunity to develop almost native speaker level pronunciation at this age. This is the most important goal! Vocabulary and everything else can be studied, but native speaker level pronunciation can only be acquired at this age!
• Select five to ten hours worth of age-appropriate material. Buying vocabulary drills or structured lessons on tape do not count!
• Create a stress-free and relaxed environment for your child and play the DVDs or CDs.
• Leave your child alone (unless you speak Mandarin) to soak in the language. It's hard to listen to a new language when Mom or Dad is chatting away in English (or whatever your native language might be).
• The length of the time spent with the material is determined by your child. If you are tempted to force your child to watch the material you have selected, you have purchased the wrong material!
• Let your child's interest level guide you. Does he or she enjoy the current material? If so, get more. Basically, go with the flow!
• Do not push the introduction of pinyin until your child reads English well. See our early blog posts for a discussion of pinyin.
• Focus on listening and speaking skills.
• Use flashcards with pictures and characters to introduce reading when your child becomes interested. Children learn quickly which characters go with which sounds. You can let them use the pinyin, if they find it interesting, but let them work with the cards on their own and see what happens. Many children focus on the link between the spoken Chinese word and the written Chinese character. This is perfect. Once your child is reading English well, he or she can quickly pick up pinyin in an afternoon!

Teaching tips: Credit to our Beijing-based language instructor and former middle school teacher Zhang. Translated from the original Mandarin by Montessori House staff (the original Mandarin was more elegantly put!)

I'm sorry I can't help you with that    You may want to PM texaslady22 and ask her experience. I think she has not been in the forum for a couple of weeks, but you may want to visit her blog and see if she has any info or maybe you can send her a message there.Her blog is http://domaninspiredparenting.blogspot.com I'll be interested in her answer.

diva7,

We built a crawling track for our daughter but she was already almost 6 months old when we started using it. I regreted  inmensibly not having built earlier. We didn't use it for sleeping purposes, but we'll definetly use it for sleeping purposes with our next baby. If I'm not mistaken texaslady, one of the members here, did use it for sleeping purposes with her baby. She said her baby was crawling since he was very little and they had to wake up to flip him so he could go the other direction. Based on this she said they would do a crawling track around the bed with the next baby. That is the way is shown in Doman's book. I think she is pregnant right now, so she may be able to give you a better idea of what she is planning to do and give you more information about her experience with it and her baby.

Hope this helps a little bit. Let me know if you have an specific question and hopefully we can find an answer 

Skylark,

I'll love to have a copy too. Please let me know how we can arrange everything so I can get a copy. I'm in the States.

Thanks! 

[advanced a level]

Joha,
the scores on the discipline pannel go like this:
+2 did it well, happily and advanced a level

Andrea,

This is what I was talking about. I'm not sure how you advance a level on discipline.

Thanks!

Also, did you see my quetsions about the German materials? Tx!

Andrea,

Thank you so much for the information. I have a couple more questions. How do you set levels for laws and civility? Would you mind sharing your method for languages? I'm latin so I speak to her all the time in Spanish, we live in teh States and my husband is american so she is learning English from hom and we have been exposing her to Mandarin and German, but I have been kind of stuck on what else to do with the languages I don't know.

Thanks again for sharing all your experiences!

PS. What materials have you used for German or where have you found the information?

Andrea,

As everyone else I'm amazed by your room and the organization of it. Could you please explain how you manage the laws and civility panels? meaning what is the criteria to mark a 1 or a 1/2, etc...? Also, I saw you have flash cards in different languages. How many languages are you taching your son? Do you speak those languages?

Again congratulations on achiving such organization and great lay out. Also, thanks for sharing all your knowledge with everyone here.

Recently I came accross the issue of all the recalls of toys made in China. They talked about the lead based paint issue and the issues with the quality control in China. Now, I'm in the debate of what kind of toys I should buy my daughter since everything goes to her mouth these days.

This is an extract of one of the articles:

"Why is lead paint — or lead, for that matter — turning up in so many recalls involving Chinese-made goods?

The simplest answer, experts and toy companies in China say, is price. Paint with higher levels of lead often sells for a third of the cost of paint with low levels. So Chinese factory owners, trying to eke out profits in an intensely competitive and poorly regulated market, sometimes cut corners and use the cheaper leaded paint."   

The problem is that most of the toys are made in China and the ones that tend to be pricy. Also, there are some very cute toys    I don't want to be "intense" about the issue, but I do want to protect my daughter. However, as much as we want to proctect our children, to make sure nothing would happens, they would have to live in a bowl!

I would like to hear some points of views...

Hi hypatia!

I totally know how you feel, even more when you see parents in this forum that are so organized and can get so many thing done(not my case ). I have done so much research and found so many things I would like to do, but I wouldn't be able to sleep preparing materials. So now, I just do what I can and try to enjoy my daughter.

Yesterday, I found this Montessori website when activities by age. I really like it becuase is by age and gives you a good idea of things you can do.

http://www.dailymontessori.com/montessori-age-12-24-months/

Also, I just got some materials to make safe-eatible finger paint. It is un-expensive and I think kids would love to do this since they can get dirty.

http://www.creativekidsathome.com/activities/activity_42.html

This same website has some other activities for younger children. I just made some bubbles last night so I can play with my daughter today.

I know you said you are not interested in teaching ehr to read, but if you change you mind later, maybe you could try to make a couple of books with pictures of you and her and just include short phrases. My guess is she will be into that. Also, it will part of the bonding experiences you want to have with her.

Hope this helps a little bit! 

One of the memory magic products is "silly story" that is the same as the memory linking you are talking about. Just check their website to see if you can try it for free.

I don't make the cereal from scratch, but I have made all her veggies and fruit purees. I have been gotten all the information from www.wholesomebabyfood.com I like this website because it has charts about the food you should give the baby based on his/her age and different receipes for each product. Also they have information about storage, freezing and recommendations about different products. Foe example they suggest to get organic grapes and they explain why.

Hope this helps!

Thanks for sharing the link. It definetly explains things much better. Which made me think about another point and it is that we need to make sure no other people push our kids out of limits (in this case her father) but sometimes is a teacher or a coach, etc.  I'm also glad to hear Sufiah is doing so much better and that the dad is out of the picture.

qisdhi mom,

As I said before the main idea of posting this link was to "help as a reminder to some of us why we are doing this and what we really are looking for from our children with all this teaching methods". If someone's goal is to have a genius that is totally up to the parent like you said, but hopefuly they don't push the kid to a limit that at the end may be driving him/hger to be one of the bad cases at the bottom of the article. I doubted to post the link because it is a touchy subject, BUT it doesn't mean it shouldn't be discussed, as doing this with love and for the right reasons is crucial for the well-being of our kids. As you said nobody can't really know what happend and if the way the kids were raised had anything to do with her "career choice". I just didn't jump into a conclusion by reading this article, before posting it, I did some research because I didn't want to link a sensationalist article, but something that could be of some use for some people. Like you can see in this thread it is a concern, because we are humans!

http://forum.brillkids.com/general-discussion-b5/do-you-get-worried-that-it's-not-really-for-the-kids/

There are plenty of articles and even a interview of her explaining why she chose that career. I just linked one  article that had some other interesting information about some prodigy kids.

I'm sorry if you were offended or if it offended some other people, it definetly was not the intention. However, I think it totally legitimate to port information we think may be relevant.

I have not read the book and to be honest after some research I'm not sure I would like to get it. I have to be honest, I doubted before posting this link, but I decided to do so because it may help as a reminder to some of us why we are doing this and what we really are looking for from our children with all this teaching methods. We just want the to enjoy learning, right?  We are humans, so it may be easy to get caught up in this exciting adventure and go away from our initial ideas of why we are doing this. The bottom of the article really caught my attention...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/features/3636101/Sufiah-Yusof---child-genius-revealed-as-prostitute.html