Hi Bella!

Thank you for writing this inspiring story! It touched me deeply and wish you all the best. I think it is better to believe those who say you are able to do things than those you who are against you. Listening your heart will take you to right places. It is often hard to do the right decisions when you don't have any role models (or other home schooling mothers) living near by you. Sounds like you are great mom to your children and doing great job doing what is best for your children. Isn't that what parenthood is all about.

Hugs! Kristiina

Thank you for sharing! Unfortunately it was already closed but the books looked great!

This is true!  This kind of issues in own behavior are hard to notice!

  Thank you for sharing! This is very interesting and I watched it carefully 

Hi!

I'm a huge fan of Doman's method AND at the same time huge fan of scientific facts. I would love to follow scientific recommendations on how to stimulate and help my baby to grow. But science seems to be following SO FAR behind and seems to be giving recommendations identified by Doman 40 years ago ("Reading is good for babies", "Sitting in a sitter is not good for baby's motor development", "Babies understand a lot more than we expect").

Also scientific arguments for or against Doman's methods seem to focus on only one of his recommendations "patterning". We are following Doman's methods but have not been doing any patterning!

I have so many questions about Doman's methods without answers. What about healthy children? What about our own children we see developing so much faster that their peers and being happier than their peers? 

Does anyone else feel  there is a cap between what the parents of early learning children know and what has been proven scientifically? 

Kristiina

Hello Martijn and welcome to this forum!

Within last 6 months while reading this forum, I have found this forum to be the top source in the internet for finding information about teaching our baby (who is now 8 months old).  Please share your insights and experiences for us to! Enjoy!

Kristiina

Hi!

Welcome and enjoy the forum! It is certainly not too late to start with a two year old because even four year old can learn extremely fast compared to adults. Also if you are starting with a new language before the child is 6 years old she should be able to catch the language without accent.

Welcome and please share your progress and ideas!

Kristiina

Hello and welcome! 

Hello!

Welcome! People in here are so great and have so much knowledge I feel so humble reading their posts. Great to have you here and please share your experience with us!

Kristiina

Hello!

Our baby is eight month old and I have started to collect different age appropriate activities for him at the same time I collect information of early learning activities.We are not artistic at all but I consider art as part of every day life. We are actually more focusing on everything else than this but I would like to be able to bring some new art project idea to our babies life every week. 

Here are art activities we have done already:

• Flashing famous painters: so far we have flashed European museums power points, and I have downloaded about 20 power points of famous painters and architecture which I am translating to Finnish
• Plaster sculpture of Magic dough: This is really fun activity! You can get example pictures of this from Google with keywords "baby's feet to play dough". The idea is to make home made eatable (?!) play dough. The dough is made by mixing 4dl of flour, 2dl of salt and 1-2dl of water until the mix is like play dough. Then make what ever you want of the dough for example cups, decoration items, snow mans or flowers. You can make the items dry either in the oven (70-150 degrees for an hour until the art work is dry from the bottom) or let the art works dry on the table for 6 hours to 2 weeks depending of the item. With a small baby you can make about 1cm circular high dough plate and then gently push baby's feet to the play dough. After keeping the dough in the oven it may last even 10 years as it is.
• Baby's feet to water color: We also mixed some water colors with water in a jar and the pushed baby's feet to it. The we moved baby's feet to paper and framed the result.
• Self made card to grandmother: Because the baby can only tear paper and rumble it at this point, we made the card for grandmothers birthday by letting baby tear and rumble some 10cm*10cm silk paper peaces which I later put in a heart shape to a card.
• Practicing with a crayons: This isn't yet going that well with a 8 month old baby!

And here are activities we are planning to do. This is my first baby so ages when I'm planning to try these may seem funny to you but the idea is to introduce these concepts in the earliest possible age 

We will do these art tasks immediately when we have suitable time and I have found materials:

• Buy real life eatable play dough to improve fine motor skills.
• Buy eatable finger paints and try them outside or in bath room 

These we will try within next year and a half

• Practicing with scissors: Make long square shape paper clip which baby can cut with one move (this was explained in more detail in here http://forum.brillkids.com/coffee-corner/pencil-grasp-fine-motor-skills/msg94319/#msg94319> )

These we will try within next 2 to 4 years:

• Photographic art project: I also have an idea of an art project as soon as our baby can speak and takes photos with a camera, we will do a project where we will go to a forest and take pictures of objects. Then we will make a book where one page is taken by adult and the other is taken by the child and it contains explanations by both for the technical choices made during the picture taking (why something is included and something left out, why the picture is blurry/not and so on.)
• Self made coloring book: As soon as the baby can draw, we will ask him to draw a pictures with black pencil. Then I will scan the pictures and print them as a book for him and his friend to color. (This idea is also somewhere from the internet)
• One day for each color (this idea is probably from the book "Testing for kindergarten"): The idea is to make for example Friday blue,  so start wearing only blue clothes, try to identify blue objects and cars, speak what blue things you see and so on.
• Virtual museum touring: We do this every now and then with my mother if we have nothing to do. Basically we search for and artist and talk about the painting and what we think about the artist and painting http://www.childandme.com/encyclopedic-knowledge-art-paintings http://www.wga.hu/   
• Ice cube coloring art project: This seems like fun: http://www.aarteidentalo.com/projektin_esittely.pdf Sorry the link is in Finnish but from the pictures you can get the idea
• Mandalas
• Coloring pictures
• Museums and art exhibitions about 2-4 times a year
• Lot's of fine motor skill practicing
• Drawing with a computer
• Playing and projects with magnets, empty cardboard boxes and other more physical art staff (I don't yet know what this is in real life  )
• Plaiting with a plants
• And a lot of free time (about 5 hours/day) when pens and crayons are available for adhoc artistic bursts

Have fun!

Thank you Tamsyn for sharing this beautiful video! It made me think what it means to be a mother and lead me to think motherhood as the role of responsibility, contribution and graciousness.  

He is so cute! Thank you for sharing! 

Hi!

According to IAHP web site, the reading program is aimed for children from birth to six. If I remember correctly, there is some age limitation related to Doman Math because according to IAHP the capability to learn using your right side of the brain without concision thinking (left side brain) was lost somewhere between ages 3 and 4. So there shouldn't be any reason why Doman reading wouldn't apply to children which are 2 or 4 and your younger child should still be in the phases where the babies learn even faster.

Regarding your other questions, I am not certain what is the optimum way. We are studying two languages (Chinese and English) since age of two months at the same time with our babies native language. I think it is important to provide encyclopedic vocabulary (animals, plants, countries,..) in child's native language because language is the key aspect of a culture and child's thinking language should be the mother language. This is just my opinion . Opposite to other persons in this thread, I am actually translating LR words to baby's native language as we use the software. This is because LR contains a lot of words we wouldn't use otherwise in our everyday life (like otter, cabinet, kite,..), so I want to give native words for those too. Babies learning several languages at the same time should be able to differentiate languages easily of each others. They seem to start using the easiest words of each language first and then end up using only one language at a time. There are several threads of this. 

Welcome! 

Kristiina

Tanikit: Well said! It is hard to disagree with your comment.  Karma.

Thank you for the great blog! Cub sounds like a happy and healthy boy and he looks so cute in the picture!

I'm very excited to read that he can already read! We have been training reading with our 8 month old everyday since his birth but so far there is no evidence he is reading yet, so it is more like "preparing" his brains and thinking for reading . It is funny to think that words he hears now don't go to neither active nor passive vocabulary because he doesn't seem to recognized 99,9% of the words he has been hearing. I believe words he hears now prepare his neurons and connections in his brains and will emerge as an understanding of the word after hearing it so many times although at the moment it seems like pouring water in to a broken bucket. 

Great to hear to he is already scribbling. I read a book that baby should be able (?!) to do that only when he is 12 months old! Alarm clock theories seem to be the main stream now although they have been proven false so many times. Our baby is already using a pinch grip but I am still waiting him to learn how to use the spoon first before introducing crayons to avoid putting any pressure or unrealistic expectations on him.

Regarding pencil grip, I think now we are going to use the "traditional route" (I remember there was a discussion about this in the forum). Maybe we will choose the mastery route when we are going to start training ice skating on next winter. I have heard it is possible to teach an toddler to ice skate as soon as they are able to walk, so this is definetly something we will try!

Great work Cub and family!