Squatting birth - no drugs

He was literally trying to get onto my breast before I had lifted him up to it latched on straight away and went for it kept that up until he self weaned at 2.5

My son and one of my four nephews were speaking in three to four word sentences (such as "I go outside now") by age one. Two of my nephews came much later however they both had severe speech delay and were barely talking well by kindergarten as a result of dispraxia which is now undercontrol and the speech issues are barely noticeable unless they get very excited.

Speech development is a very individualised area there are so many factors that can affect the timing of speech and there is certainly no true normal

musical education begins in the womb and ends in the grave and varies for every single individual on this planet.

When your baby was born they were born with the wonderful ability to hear and learn every note. Like language though this ability diminishes with age unless used.

So to ensure that your child keeps their wonderful natural abilities give them plenty of variety in the types of background music that you play. Contrary to popular belief you should not limit this to classical or orchestral music. Get a variety of musical genres from a variety of different cultures and allow your child to make their own decision on how music effects them. My son, even in the womb, has always been very particular about what he likes and doesn't like and music really is a personal choice.

In regards to extending their musical abilities this is a great age for percussive and rhythmical games. Access to musical instruments both real and homemade is important. If you google home made instruments you'll find heaps of examples. A personal favourite of mine is rice in different containers. But anything can make music so just and experiment and have fun.

He was 2.5 with very picky taste in tv shows. His favourite movies are The Gods Must Be Crazy one and two so pleasing him with childrens' shows can be difficult 

I was very impressed with the tweedlewink program. Unfortunately we got them for my boy when he was a bit old he has a tendency to memorise things in one sitting quote them the second time and then not want anything to do with them. Having said that he thoroughly enjoyed them and bothered to watch them a second time which he wont do for many programs.

It may seem random but I believe they give just the right amount of information to form the neural pathways, keep the child's interest and then move on.

I'd definitely recommend following dna's suggestion of reading the other posts on tweedlewink in the forum.

Hi Karri, and welcome to the Forum, it's great to have you here.

I must say, as professional musos, my husband and I find your competition and the ideas behind it fantastic!!!!

People are often surprised that we have taught our son to read etc but have not given him formal music lessons (despite this he can count in time to 5/8 music without being told what signature it is!).

Our reason is that we believe too much emphasis in music education is placed on learning the notes and playing pieces and nowhere near enough time is spent helping children to be creatively expressive through their music. Many musos I know personally are a product of this kind of education and will tell you they struggle with composition and improvisation and often also with "feel".

Best of luck - we'll certainly be putting our boy's composition into the draw.

There are so many many things to consider when it comes to skipping a grade.

We all want our children to enjoy learning and being in a situation where everything is too easy is not a great start to enjoying the learning experience.

I'm talking from personal experience here as my parents decided that extra curricula activities would be of more benefit than skipping a grade or two at school. In many ways their decision worked out fantastically - I have many many skills in areas I am passionate about and the only reason I was able to do all of these is because school was so easy for me.

Having said that I never had any respect for education - in the school sense. It bored me senseless I felt I could do it all in a quarter of the time myself and have more time for more important things. Self education and my extra curricula activities were met with extreme discipline, stick-to-it-iveness, joy, passion and appreciativeness of the opportunity.

I hated, even dreaded, school. I had trouble conversing with the kids in my classes and by high school was tending to hang out with much older children and even teachers. My social skills suffered as a direct result of having no one in my classes who enjoyed what I enjoyed or understood what I understood. I played up in class and was almost constantly in trouble until I finally swapped to the public school system and was put into the gifted and talented and talent development programs. Unfortunately I was well into highschool by this point and never really learned to enjoy the classroom.

Had I been put ahead academically to a level that would have challenged me and with kids who were thinking at the same level as me I may have enjoyed school a lot more and had less trouble socialising as I grew up. I still would have coped with the extra curricula because I was naturally bright.

I believe if you are truly gifted (not just well coached and tutored) then you need to be with other children who think at your level. 

So the things to consider, I guess, come down to what you know of your child....are they ahead because you have done amazing things and given them a great educational headstart or is he also thinking at a level above his age? Reasoning skills and conversation levels and imagination levels are all things you should take into account.

He does read and write well and does maths well but how are his gross motor skills? Did you also do the physically superb program? What kids does he like to play with children his own age or older children? Is he a leader or a follower - personally I would be reticent to put a follower ahead I'd let their achievement levels that will come from being ahead help them gain confidence and learn leadership skills. However if they naturally play and converse well and hold their own with older children then put them ahead in a place where they will be with children at their level.

Another thing to consider is when they skip a grade. Better sooner than later. Skipping kindy or year one is one thing but skipping year 8 is another. I've seen talented dancers skip grades and as a result end up with patchy dance education because every grade in the syllabus is designed to teach the foundations for the following grade. It is the same in school curricula. A friend's brother skipped year 8 because he was talented but had as a result not been taught some of the work that you needed to know before your learned the year nine work so he ended up having to do double the work sometimes to fill in the gaps. Far better I think that they work at the right level from the beginning. Being able to cope cognitively with the concepts of the work is not the same as having good foundations laid for doing the work.

Good luck with it 

I really believe the key to success and stress free early education is to be sure you're not results orientated.

If you go in wanting your child to be reading this well by this age and so on you will stress both of you out.

However, if your approach is to show your child wonderful and exciting things in a fun and loving way the choice to absorb the material is theirs and children being children they tend to choose to learn.

It also helps to remember that the aim of early education is to make later learning easier, to form pathways in the brain that allow this learning to take place more easily in the future - it is not to create a child who can read Wuthering Heights at four or do calculus at three - although this can happen it is not the aim.

Just enjoy the process and revel in the bonding that it will bring any thing on top of that is a bonus.

When my boy was moving from 12 piece puzzles to 24 - a ridiculous gap but I was having trouble finding anything in between that was affordable - he lost his confidence and was completely overwhelmed and stopped wanting to do puzzles.

So I instead got the big 48 piece floor puzzles out and would assemble them but would leave pieces out. At first I would leave out single pieces scattered all over the puzzle and as he got into it I would increase the gaps to two or three missing pieces in a clump and so on and so forth until he was essentially doing a 24 piece puzzle and then we went back to those.

This game helped a lot and put him back on track it was also a lot of fun for him and far less overwhelming.

You can do this with any size puzzle.

But to be honest from everything I've read your son's skills are right on target and he's doing well so relax with it a bit and just find games to help him when he stumbles

We took a bit of a different approach with our little one - we're both musos (I sing, piano, violin, drums, guitar and bits and pieces hubby drums guitar and sings and bits and pieces) so we were both really reticent about lessons and decided that music would simply be everywhere all the time in all sorts of forms. We wanted him to love and appreciate music and have a feel for a whole bunch of styles and instruments so he could make choices when it suits him.

From when he came home he has had his own sticks and would sit on his father's lap and play together my husband would repeat the random rhythms he made - you have to be careful because as babies their movements are so random but it was great for his grip. Once he could pull himself up and hold on he had his african drum and bongos on which we would play rhythm games with him.

Also from birth a bunch of hand held instruments, eggs, maraccas, jingle bells (you must watch them every moment with these).

In addition to this he would watch Bass day '98 with Victor Wooten who was a child prodigy (it's a tutorial as well as a performance - talks a bit about how he learned from age two from his ten year old brother and how music to him is a language absolutely brilliant to listen to) and is one of the world's best bass players. He would also watch a drumming dvd with samples of the world's best drummers giving short tutorials. Live concerts of all varieties of music (well when I say all I must admit to a bit of musical prejudice I have refused to expose him to Nick Cave and other styles like death metal and grunge) he loves the band "return to forever" which is made up of some of the world's leading players he is also a big Sting fan (very happy about that the kid shows good taste) and has a tendency to say goodbye to the Wiggles and other such "children's bands".

From about twelve months on I gave him my grandfather's harmonica and a recorder and free access to all my instruments and he walks around composing little pieces and dancing while playing.The harmonica is great for children because they can easily create beautiful sounding tunes just by breathing he has taught himself to play dynamically and his compositions get longer and longer and more and more interesting. We also find they are very in tune with his mood at the time which is what we hoped for - a creative and emotional musician, not a note player.

For reading music he has tweedlewink and Doman Picture dictionaries and we have sheet music lying around everywhere so he often watches his father playing from drum charts before a gig.However we are not in a rush for him to learn to read music - we expose him he knows what the notes are and he knows what the rhythms are but we're waiting for his lead on when to combine it to an instrument. He is having way too much fun doing his own things at the moment and he has taught himself some very valuable lessons.

We sing to him constantly he has been to our gigs and watched from the audience or the changeroom and he has been to rehearsals when he's in the mood we have family band sessions all jumping around onto different instruments and just playing nonsense music - it's a lotta fun!!

Recently he watched the Incredibles (cartoon movie) for the first time. The intro music is in 5/8 and he was counting 123451234512345 in time with it without us having even thought about it so we're pretty happy with his rhythmical abilites. He also sings in tune (songs he knows) and makes up beautiful little songs to sing.

At this point we continue to let him play all of our instruments whenever he wants to - he picked up a ukele the other day and started plucking it with beautiful hand technique that he could only have got from watching the Victor Wooten DVD.

He worked out for himself that abc and twinkle twinkle share their melodies - it was an amazing discovery to him that he could sing two songs to the same backing, it was amazing for us to watch this dawn on him I wouldn't have really thought of pointing it out to him at this point.Bit silly of me really.

We know he has great pitch, great timing, expressive feel and a love of music now we're just waiting for him to decide what he wants to do with it.

We read every day at least one session more if he asks. The amount of time depends entirely on what he wants to do.

We read anything from books with single words to encyclopedias. He always chooses the books from his bookshelf. We have been lucky my Aunty is a librarian and so anytime they're getting rid of books she buys them up for him so he has a rather extensive range to go through.

Reading is an activity he chooses when he stops running. So basically it's not something we sit down to do at high energy times and there have been weeks in the past where all he has wanted to do was practice a new emerging physical skill at these times his interest in reading (well in sitting still) has been lower.

Great interview thanks for sharing

We started from around three months -

lots of games for increasing reaction speed, tickling games that taught him how to instinctively block and he would accompany me to private karate lessons (I study Shotokan Karate).

We also downloaded the Shotokan Karate Kata on youtube and he watches those with me while I practice them.

He has no idea of what it is he is learning as in regards to self defence or combat but I believe it will make learning faster later.

The tickling games have paid off as my mum's dog has a tendency to want to lick his face (they're the same height at the moment) and Sabian automatically blocks without thinking. It felt great watching him do it instinctively the first time.

Whether or not these games will pay off later I don't know but I figure they can't hurt

Richard Feynman - one of the worlds foremost mathematicians and physicists in his time and a genius always claimed that we teach maths with the wrong approach and I tend to agree.

The fact is that we are all good at maths - if we weren't we wouldn't be able to complete a simple task such as lifting a cup to our mouth and drinking from it - a task that requires incredible computations. If you were to try to train a robot to do said task the mathematical formula and the information it would need would be lengthy indeed.

Maths is everywhere and in everything we do you don't need to do anything special to find maths just think about what you are doing and you'll find that maths is there..... crossing the road? how fast do you need to walk in order to get across before the car that is approaching you at a speed of ?? catches up to you - the fact is your subconscious mind does that equation with ease.

The problem of course is tapping into this subconscious awareness of mathematics and bringing it into the conscious mind.

The key to this is imagination and imagination is limited to an extent by our experiences and knowledge.

Did you know that Einstein used to imagine himself flying through the universe and this is how he worked out the theory of relativity - the maths came later.

At this age the best thing you can do for your child is give them hands on number experiences and concepts.

Examples: Snack time - cut an apple in half then in half again and then in half again and so on all the while talking about the fractions you are creating.

Play lots of water games - what sinks what floats and why? How much water fits in this cup? How many cups do I need to fill to take all the water out of this jug?

What fits inside this box and what doesn't?

Shape sorters and puzzles are great for mathematical thinking and problem solving.

Everything should be fun fun fun.

Remember they'll unfortunately get plenty of time to do boring traditional maths when they get inside a traditional classroom. Why ruin a fun subject for them before you have to?

There is a fantastic BBC show called the "Number Jacks" my son absolutely loves them, they are fun and use real life mixed with imagination to bring math concepts to children. They are intended for school age children but my boy has loved them since he was 18 months when I found them and as a result his concepts of length and weight and problem solving are quite advanced.

Best of luck with it and remember you can't go wrong if you're playing and having fun.

"Reader Rabbit - Toddler" is fantastic for emerging computer skills.

All games only require the child to master the hover and mouse control not buttons. Some of the games are so ridiculously easy that a newborn could manage them and others require strategy. We found this a great way to give our son confidence with the mouse without having to worry about right click and left click etc.