We are also in SA, and it looks like I'll be following the same route as you are once my 3 year old reaches school age.  I know how popular homeschooling has become, but I thought it's required by law to enroll with a homeschooling firm.  Then again, I'm asking questions but I've not really done my homework on the subject.

Thanks

This is a wonderful update, thank you!

Are you registered with a homeschooling provider at all?

My boy could never clap along, he later started learning the acoustic guitar and couldn't really keep time with it either, but then when we got RockSmith he immediately could keep time while playing on his new electric guitar (once he got the hang of holding this bigger guitar that is) because he needs to be in time or else he misses the notes in the game.  I started tapping to a beat while singing or listening to music when I was pregnant and I still tap his back now at age 3, I've done this countless times, multiple times a day, it's just a habit and I've always thought it soothes my boy, but he really could never keep beet before he needed it to play his RockSmith game, so before that, he never could.  Kids often look like they've not learned something, maybe they're pretending, or maybe they believe it themselves, but that doesn't mean they've not learned.

Another solution will be to set the set the word games to display words or nothing after the correct word is chosen, here's how:

1.  Click on the gear button next to the game button in the middle and at the bottom of your LR app window, this will bring up game settings.
2.  Select the "BK Word Game (Auto) - US" preset in the "ALL GAME PRESETS" list box on the left.
3.  Select "Word Only" or "Nothing" in the "After correct answer, show:" drop down list.
4.  Save.

Unfortunately there's no way to switch the picture audios off in the games unless you switch them off for the entire lesson and as A_BC mentioned, if you specifically want the questions out, you'll have to go through all the slides and delete them one by one, which will mean they will not be part of the lessons at all.

Hope this helps but feel free to ask more questions.

I must say, the animations in Little Reader and Little Musician being all white is not something I see as a diversity problem because we've always thought of them as "the brill kids family" bothers, sister, father, mother etc. and having the same characters shown over and over gives a feeling of familiarity, which is something I like in any product.  There are a few non-white pictures, but the video clips are indeed all white kids.  As far as I know, most of the children in the clips and photos are from the original BrillKids users, not specifically chosen because they are white, but coincidentally so.  Again, I also like that we see the same kids repeatedly, I know many of their names and call them by their names when we're watching the lessons.

Fortunately, the media is not 100% white, one of the stories have a black boy animation and there are images of Asians and Africans here and there.  The black boy animation was new with version 3 which gives me the impression that the BK team are working (ever so slowly) towards including greater diversity.  Viewing the product as a whole, it's really only the body parts and action categories that have this diversity issue, this is 30% of the basic course and not at all included in the additional packs, so about 20% over all.  What I'm trying to say is that 80% of the BrillKids media do not include people at all, so maybe conciser deleting the categories you dislike and rebuilding a course with what's left, you could even include some stuff from the library to fill up the 20% gap.

I've been searching the internet for images quite a bit over the last 2 years and I've found that for any vocabulary item I search, I'm more likely to find white people in the pictures unless I specifically search for "a black boy flying a kite" for instance.  This might have to do with world marketing etc, but again, this should be kept in mind when looking at the media used in the BK products, white pictures are just more readily available.  (I'm not saying this is how it should be, I'm saying this is how it is.)

I'm 100% with you when you talk about diversity in the BK programs, but something else to keep in mind is that black people can look very different depending on where in the world they come from, and adding diversity is by all means not limited to adding black people.  I think the BrillKids team will have a very tough time if they didn't want anybody to feel left out. 

Another point that I want to make is that English, Spanish and French, has it's origins in Europe.  To me it wasn't at all strange to see white faces that goes along with my English curriculum.  Then when I translated it all to Afrikaans, I added some South African images here and there, but when it came to my Zulu curriculum, it felt so strange to have these majority white images and videos go along with my Zulu words, but then I left it as is, because it's as you say, adding images and videos is very time consuming.  Again, with the Chinese curriculum, I was expecting to see Chinese children, but to my disappointment it was more or less the same images from the English curriculum.  Knowing that replacing the white images with Chinese ones would have cost time and money, I can understand why this was not done and I would rather have a product with the original white pictures than having no product at all.

This is a very good point to raise and I'm sure BK will work on this some time in the future, but I like that their main focus at this time is adding more language packages and don't really mind them using the same images over and over, somehow this familiarity makes the subsequent courses more enjoyable and the meanings of words clearer to my boy.

I know this doesn't quite "fix things" but our Little Reader country course has lots of diversity!

Pleased to meet you Hien, my name is Carla and I'm from South Africa 

I think 5 months is a fantastic age to start your little one's EL journey and I'm sure you are very excited.  The questions you're asking are very tricky, they depend on so many factors.  Your child's personality and how much he enjoys his lessons will greatly influence his learning.  I chose to show the TW lessons a total of 8 times each, that is roughly 2 times the first week the lesson is introduced, then about 2 weeks later, then a month later, then 2 months, 4 months, 8 months, etc.  We're only watching 1 episode a day.  This choice was based on my son's age (he was about 2.5 years when we started) and the fact that a lot of the material covered in the lessons was old for him.  I started including TW in our days because I was after the right brain stimulation it gives.

The Shichida method encourages us to only show lessons (particularly image flashcard and EK) 2 or 3 times in total.  The fast flash and limited repeats encourages photographic memory.  But when it comes to material that you would like your little one to memorize and become very familiar with (like phonics, sight words, quantities or dots, etc.)  you should probably take Glen Doman's advice and repeat many many times (3 times a day, 10 to 30 days is what is suggested when you start out with Doman's bit cards.)   You can use this knowledge to start off with, but from here you'll have to pay close attention to your little one.  When he's older he might display his knowledge (take note that children usually dislike being tested and many seem to hide their knowledge for months or years before you see anything,)  but while he's this young, you can try and tell by how he responds, if he use to seem interested in the program, but he starts to loose interest, that might mean that he's learned all he wanted from that DVD and he's ready to move on.

I think many of us stop caring about if a product is working or not, because we've got many backups.  Most of us use multiple things, from apps to books to videos, I don't mean to overwhelm you when you're just starting out, but over the course of the following months and years you'll probably accumulate a lot of EL stuff too.  I'm not saying get them all, TW is already a very complete package, but it's nice to have some variety and you'll find many programs compliment each other greatly. 

Something else that you should keep in mind is that, you'll make it easier for your little one to learn from the lessons if you incorporate some of it in your daily lives.  At 5 months it's harder, but if you have alphabet letters of some form (fridge magnets, foam letters, soft blocks etc) you could play specifically with 2 or 3 of the letters that were in today's lesson.  If they were counting by 2's, then count some toys by 2's.  This is not as important when teaching a baby as it is when he reaches 2 or 3, but it's good to start getting into the practice of doing so.  Again, there's no need to go overboard and replicate the entire lesson in real life, just a few things to show the baby that the things in the lesson matters to you and it exists in his every day life.  An extension of  this idea is to put posters, pictures or word labels up on the wall in his room or anywhere where he could see it daily.  You could point to them, but even if you don't he'll be seeing it often and his curiosity will grow, therefor his enjoyment in the lessons will grow too.

I was always one to complain on the forum about my boy not learning from our activities, now finally after 3 years, more and more knowledge just seems to come to the foreground!  It really isn't easy to wait for your little one to start reading and doing math and all the wonderful things we see on the videos, and of course it is a possibility that your own baby might be one of the many wondrous little ones who read or do math and music early, but this is by far not the norm.  EL has huge benefits in the long run, that should be your motivator, but placing too much hope on an 18 month old reader is setting yourself up for disappointment.   

Please try not to think about if he's learning or not, it's unnecessary stress.  Small children and especially babies don't need to look like they are concentrating for them to learn.  Many here on the forum have reported that they taught an older child something, then when it's time for their younger sibling to learn that skill, he basically already knew how to do it, and then they go on to say that he never even looked like he was paying any attention to it.

Sorry for not giving you a straight answer, but I really don't think there is one.

Good luck and enjoy it!  Teaching my boy is the most rewarding experience of my life!

Forgot to mention, my boy also teethed late 

Attached is a photo of him at 14 months, haha!

The reading is no 100% reading, it's actually lots of talking about pictures too, but we end up spending about 1 to 1.5 hours 2 to 3 times a day. He loves books!  If it's raining all day then we sometimes spend more, but over weekends its often way less.

TW is not bad at all.  We typically do a 5 minute lesson once a day, about 4 or 5 lessons a week.  They repeat a lot of things that we did 2 years ago, so I'm in part using it for review, it also contains quite a bit of EK bits that we're seeing for the first time.  I've only had it for about 8 months, it's targeted at the under 3's, but since my boy is not really reading yet I'm glad to have it as an additional resource.

I did a lengthy TweadleWink vs LittleReader comparison if you would like to have a look:
http://forum.brillkids.com/teaching-your-child-to-read/little-reader-vs-tweedlewink/msg103234/?topicseen#new

To me it seems right brain stimulation falls more under Shichida (which I don't know much about) than what it falls under Doman, and it's not limited to flashcards but includes a bunch of other stimulation like photo-eye-play, eye-movement, memory linking, mandalas, mental imaging and many more.  Dot cards can't completely be replaced by words and pictures alone, from a right brain stimulation point of view, because teaching math operations using the dot cards add another dimension to them, which is also a very good right brain activation activity.  We gave Little Math a good run from time to time, but my boy would often just look away and wait for it to end (because that's when the fun stuff starts, haha!)  If he did learn any arithmetic from it, I have no concrete way of proving it.

Here's how to set your icons to permanently show red dots: 
1.  Click the "Override" button at the bottom right of the LM window so that it says "Override ON" with a green dot next to it.
2.  Click on the gears icon next to it to open the settings window.
3.  Click "Numbers" to select the numbers tab (if it's not already selected) and then the "Display & Sound" subtab.
4.  Click to select "Icons" (if it's not already selected) then color the dot next to the settings "icon" and "shape color" green (meaning you're overriding these settings and not the others)
5.  For the icon setting select the icon radiobutton -> sets -> basic shapes -> circle
6.  For the color setting select "Set Color" from the drop down list then pick red on the color box.

Once you've done that I'm sure you'll figure many more things out with the rest of the settings.  It's quite a nifty app and I'm half sorry we didn't get the most out of it, but then there's always a next little one who might just love it.

Here's my personal view on things:

Fast flash is a right brain stimulation, whether you're going to flash pictures, words or dots.  I've read of people who feel that even though their children didn't gain anything from the flashing activities, they do show heightened right brain functionality later on, as in speed reading, photographic memory and in general above average creativity and ability to solve problems etc.  I've also heard of babies who COULD subitize and use dot cards perfectly well to add numbers 1..100, but never carried that ability over to using numbers or metal math.  Cases vary as much as the personalities and characteristics of the children and families practicing these techniques. 

In my own case, my boy never liked the dots much but he could also distinguish quantities only up to 5 by age 2, these he probably picked up through play and everyday use.  I neglected math for long in favor of reading, EK and other physical skills, but I've been taking math seriously from his 3rd birthday and I'm amazed at the ease he's picking things up now!  Then you never know if the flashing (and in particular dot flashing) played any role and if he would have picked up math easily now in any case... (although I doubt that he would if I had removed ALL the little things I did for math in the first 3 years.)

Most people here would advise you to not start over on the program, unless as you said, he doesn't watch the lessons with bigger quantities, but does watch lessons with smaller quantities.  Maybe have a look at the lessons under the "Play/Edit" screen to help teach him to count backwards, skip count, add small numbers etc.
Also, have a look at the override function to set your lessons to all show only shapes or dots, then you don't need to change each lesson manually (a setting/settings will automatically apply to anything you run if override is on.)

My boy found these factor dots interesting, they're basically dots arranged in patterns according to the factors they are built from, like 45 = 5 groups of 3 groups of 3 dots.  Maybe have a look, they're not meant to be used as one lesson though, back when I was using them, I would arrange them by prime numbers, factors of 2,3,4 etc counting up/down/random:  http://library.brillkids.com/download.php?cid=1&tid=&lid=&fid=9333

Fantastic news that he's responding well to LR and LMs!!  Congrants and keep going!

Wow!  Sounds like you must be really busy with the 3 little ones!  I only have one boy, 3 years old, we started prenatally with lots of reading, I still read to him a lot (about 3 hours a day  at the moment) and this has been the basis of our learning throughout.  Other than that, I've mainly used BrillKids Little Reader and to a lesser extent programs like Readeez, Tweedlewink, BrillKids Little Musician, BrillKids Little Math, Alphablocks, Number Crew etc.  My approach has largely been input based for the first 3 years, but for the last 2 months after his birthday, we've started Kumon worksheets, playing chess games, and doing more structured activities where I can instruct him and he follows "orders" (as a tot he would NEVER do this, but he grew up a lot around his 3rd birthday.) 

My boy's development is strange in the sense that I would give him tons of input and see no signs of him learning anything, then all of a sudden it just all comes out at once.  He didn't talk at all until about 22 months, when he suddenly talked full sentences in 2 languages!  Didn't walk until 15 months, but could run soon after!  He does this sort of thing all the time.  Despite a crazy amount of reading instruction and lessons, he's only just started sounding out simple words and still finds it very difficult, but I half expect him to just take off with his reading at some point just as he's done in many other things.

We also neglected math, we tried the Doman dots method when he was a baby but he never really took to it and I've never really tried other method up to now, we're doing Kumon math and I'm very happy with his progress so far (mainly counting up to 30 and back and writing numbers.)  He did pick up on some basic math concepts through everyday play, smaller quantities, fractions, money, time, etc.  I think he gets adding and subtracting but he doesn't like to be tested and often gives incorrect answers on purpose (in general).

Your eldest might have missed out a bit, but he gets the opportunity to see his younger siblings go through an EL experience.  Does he help you teach the little ones?

I'm no EL expert and I'm sure there's many on the forum who can better help you with math ideas, but I would give Little Math a try for your 8 month old.  Some kids fall in love with it and others never like it, but giving the trial a go can't hurt.

All the best   

Welcome Lund!  You have come to the right place!   

Many of us feel exactly as you do, the "real world" just don't get us.  There are in fact millions of early learning families and the practice is as old as anything, but unfortunately we're spread thin, in the minority and greatly misunderstood.  Personally, I never talk EL to non-EL parents, it only causes tension, but here you can really speak your mind, ask questions and share your successes without feeling judged (well, most of the time in any case.)

What ages are your kids and what have you guys been up to prior to joining BrillKids?

I like to show flashcards 3 days in a row, abandon for a week, review once, abandon for 2 weeks, then 4 weeks, 2 months, 4 months, 8 months...  Well, at least, I aim for this pattern but it doesn't always work out to be exactly that.
If I have some EK in LR where it's easy to organize, then I'll also follow the above pattern, but in general I just read and discuss non-fiction children's books.  I sometimes manage to follow the above review pattern, but with books it's harder for me because my boy has always liked to pick what books we will be reading.  National Geographic readers, I wonder why series, children's encyclopedias etc all work well for us.

You can delete the food icons with a trial! 

Media Library -> Icon Sets -> Food -> delete (red X)

Goodbye evil plates of greasy foods!