Hello!

Welcome to the forum!  Most people I have read about have found the Early Learning when their first baby is already two or three. So do not worry, you are in no way late

With any younger baby I would start with Doman How to Teach Your Baby to Be Physically Superb. There has been found a tight link between physical and intellectual development of a baby. Because your daughter is developing very fast and has already passed most of the content I would start with something else.

The next important thing to me would be to encourage the baby to start reading, so I would buy some book or LittleReader for that. Our 8 month old baby loves LittleMusician. He is trying to clap the table and sing while we watch it, so that would be something I would try also.

Please tell how you are progressing!

Great comments!   

I still think that wearing colors according to your gender is part of fitting in and growing your self consciousnesses. There are several types of adult clothing too which are equally absurd but I would still wear them (in those positions!) to give the instant impression of being part of the group. Police men wear uniforms to give an impression of authority and reliability. Doctors wear white to give an idea of being hygienic and professional. Business people are wearing suites to instantly give an impression of trust worthy person who knows what he is doing and has expertise.

I think it is very important to give an clear model to a child what is expected (clothes, toys, behavior,..) until the child is able and willing to decide by himself. Often ideas of personal characteristics are built in the matter of moments based on stereotypes. Let's use them accordingly!   

Yes! Go ahead with your plans! You are doing great work! 

The worst thing that could happen is that your baby wouldn't learn these languages  so why not try. Our baby is 8 months old and so far we have trained Finnish (my mother language), English (LR), Chinese (LR) and baby signs. I'm also thinking going through Little Reader French curriculum after finishing Chinese curriculum. We will continue giving our baby weekly Chinese exposure using Chinese Children tv series from Youtube after finishing the curriculum to keep the language active because you don't hear any Chinese in Finland! Most of tv programs (~80%) are in English with Finnish subtitles so after learning English basics you hear and see it daily.

Everyone in Finland has to learn Finnish, Swedish and English. I studied the least amount of Swedish I could and had to still study it total for 6 years (2 or 3 years is primary school, 3 years in high school and half years in university to pass the mandatory exam). You have to choose either Swedish or English as your A language. To minimize Swedish exposure, I chose English which I then had to study for 12,5 years to pass the minimum requirements for A language in all school levels (7 years in primary school, 3 years in high school and 0,5 years in university). It is also typical to choose fourth language (German, French, Russia or something else) in high school and maybe if you are interested a fifth language in university. Overall, teaching multiple languages to our baby seems very natural idea.

Before age 4 we are planning to go through the basics of languages me or my husband know (Swedish, German, Russia, Spanish) to ease pronunciation and learning words later. I'm also thinking of teaching Latin and Arabic basics to give fuller exposure to world of languages. Teaching these five languages seem now hardest to me because I don't yet know which curriculum to use as I am not confident enough with my pronunciation, so I would prefer to use some program or ready made materials.

To summarize, we are aiming for fluency in Finnish, English and Swedish. Little Reader coverage in French and Chinese. And basics in at least German, Russia, Spanish, Latin and Arabic.

Good luck!

Great work! I will add this to our list of encyclopedic knowledge to cover. 

I bet, if you would take a week and stay home with your daughter without any hobbies, you would end up being unhappy and miserable!

My husband is exactly the same. He is already worried whether our baby is going to suffer on summer when I am going back to work and he is staying home with him. He is wondering if it is going to slow down our baby's progress as no one is going to be doing Encyclopedic knowledge or Little Reader with our baby. To me it is most important that my husband does what ever he enjoys most. It couldn't be good for anyone for him trying to do something he doesn't buy into. I would prefer seing them doing some guy stuff outdoors what ever might that be than trying to imitate some imaginary optimal behavior. Everyone knows in their heart what is best place for them. 

Enjoy!

My home country Finland ranks top two in world gender gap analysis. There is a rumor of a small about 7 year old girl who had asked her parents whether it is really possible for a man to be a president as we had always had a female president during her lifetime.

http://www.weforum.org/issues/global-gender-gap

I think that the gender is very important for persons sense of personality and I plan to raise my children accordingly. To me it is very important to raise my boy to wear mainly blue clothes, play mainly with toys meant for boys and so on. If I ever have a girl I am planning to raise her to wear pink and red clothes and to play with girlish or non-gender toys. I am not an absolute with this. If after all this they wish to wear other colors or play with other toys I will be more than happy to provide those too. To me choosing an life career is not gender related topic as I have chosen technical path for myself too.

I think guys have far narrower definition for gender than girls because girls can act like tomboys without any problems but guys couldn't act like girls without having a lot of problems.

All people have some things in common. They wish to be heard. They wish to contribute to something greater than themselves. They wish to feel valuable and appreciated. These things are not related to culture or gender but they are basic human needs. Differences between individual persons are always far greater than differences between any generic groups.

Your daughter sounds great! It sound like you are doing good job in encouraging your daughter in her interests and it will be an great asset for her to know what kind of practicing it takes to learn a new skill.

When you think about it, playing violin is not that much different to start practicing swimming, football or ice hockey at young age and most parents are fine with those hobbies. Maybe they just haven't heard of such thing before to be able to fully evaluate what it means. After all after using 1 hour a day for violin lessons, you still have 23 hours left for free playing too! It is all about cultural norms and you need to do what is right for your family regardless of those norms. You must do (as you are doing!) what is right for your family because you are the only person able to evaluate that. Anyway, you are doing great supporting her interests and giving her possibilities to perform with other children. Karma to you!

We have also been planning to start some instrument after finishing second curriculum in Little Musician but this is so far ahead I haven't planned it that well yet. 

How have you told your children about clock, week days or seasons?

What I have realized is that people see abstract  concepts very differently. This affects how time related concepts are visualized for a baby. Consider following concepts and how you would visualize them?

• Year: For me a year is a round circle going anti clockwise, starting from New year on top, summer in the bottom and ending to Christmas in one o'clock.
• Week and month: For me a week is a straight line starting from Monday (as it is marked according to ISO standard and German notation) and month is 4-5 weeks on top of each others as in calendar.
• Day: For me day is like a clock

Here are some other concepts which people tend to visualize differently in their minds:

• Life: For me life is an arc which is starting from the left, ending to the right, rapidly raising before age of five to half way, peaking at the age of 40 and rapidly dropping at 75-80.
• Phone number / pin codes: I see phone numbers as series of three or four or as visual forms like a pyramids or squares

   
In an ideal world, I would love to have a board with following information included: a clock, a weekday, a date, a year showing all months and seasons in pictures to teach these concept to our baby.

Great thread!

These worries seem reasonable indeed. I have thought a lot about this topic but from slightly different point of view. If you consider mainstream movies or tv series, there hasn't been that many active and thinking female leading characters before 1990. The only active female main characters I can think of were Charlie's angles. I personally have hard time watching an entire movie without any female characters to relate to.  

Since then the situation has improved a lot. There seems to be plenty of active and thinking female characters to choose like Tomb raider, Buffy the vampire killer, Twilight series just to name few.

Now that I read your comments I start to think whether this kind of transition is still somewhat already happening/ waiting to happen in the children tv series and toys. I was very happy when The Powerpuff Girls started. Also Dora the Explorer is an example of this kind of active female main character.

I happen to find this great early learning brain development video of Dr. Patricia Kuhl and brain scanning infant brains at 9 months how they develop in first years:
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/dOjSZvkXMYI&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/dOjSZvkXMYI&rel=1</a>

Hi!

We had the same situation couple of months ago when our baby was 6 months old and we were in a day 65 lessons. The stage lasted for 5 weeks and my guess is it was because our baby was not ready to understand the concept of "addition". He was still interested of quantities but lost interest otherwise. We have since then done one lesson every now and then, skipped Sessions 2 for each day and today was the first day we did entire Session 1 without a break since more than a month.   

I think it is good thing to have a break and wait until the baby catches the interest again. I think the LM software is great because I would hate to make Doman quantities flash cards manually or with PowerPoint but there are couple of things that could ease small babies enjoying the software more.

One thing is that especially addition sessions are far too long. They should be max 5-6 equations long to be exciting for an infant. Current lesson length makes it also hard to cut the session immediately when you get the feeling the baby has seen enough because you wouldn't want to rewatch or miss any content if not required. One thing which would make equation sessions more fun would be to change the icon during the lesson (this could be also made by dividing the content to sessions of fewer equations and having a icon for each).

Also some Smilies icons and yellow flower icon (icon-flower-daffodil.gif) are not bright enough to be interesting as a small icons (maybe just drop pink, white, light purple and light yellow icons).

One thing is also the picture editor which could be a bit easier as I was unable to find how to change the icon background to be invisible.

Thank you of the great software!

Thank you everyone for your contribution in this forum! You guys are an inspiration to us! So far, I have been following PokerCub Wild Childhood adventure blog and we are basically doing most of the activities listed in there. Thank you PokerCub and parents! 

WHAT WE HAVE BEEN DOING
My LO is now 7,5 months old and I have been doing lots of early learning things with him since his birth. We are using Little Reader (English and Chinese), Little Math and Little Musician. We have also started Encyclopedic knowledge with animals and mathematics.

I have been reading quite a lot early learning literature and my favorite books are:
   • Doman, How smart is your baby?
   • Fowler, Talking from infancy
   • Neil Harvey, Kids Who Start Ahead
   • Ph.D. John Gottman, et al, Raising An Emotionally Intelligent Child The Heart of Parenting
   • Geoff Colvin, Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else
   
I have also bought these but haven't yet had time to read these:
   • Karen Quinn, Testing for Kindergarten
   • Suzette Haden Elgin, The Gentle Art of Communicating with Kids
   • Karen McCreadie, George S. Clason's The Richest Man in Babylon: A 52 brilliant ideas interpretation
   • Dr. Haim G. Ginott, et al, Between Parent and Child: The Bestselling Classic That Revolutionized Parent-Child Communication
 
MOTOR DEVELOPMENT
I think that the most import area you can work with your baby is the motor development (mainly tummy time and balance activities) because those are the are developing slowest. Our little one is now sitting with perfect posture and he is creeping to all places. He pulls himself up to standing position about 30 times a day and seems to be practicing to improve his balance.

We have been eaten a lot of finger food and he is now able to drink all the water he needs by himself from a baby cup and able to eat about half of a pear without any help. He was also able to grasp a frozen raspberry yesterday with too fingers and put it to his mouth. I think he hated it because he didn't put another one to his mouth after that! 

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
Another area which I consider import is the language development. We have been reading a lot since infancy and also practiced letter sounds. For the past four months we have been labeling everything we see and for the past week I have been starting to use a lot of two word combinations (mom's shirt, yellow book and so on..). 

He seems to be able to use couple of simple words within a context. On top of these words he is using all the alphabets in his babbling and saying a lot of words in context but as he is babbling a lot (2hours/day?) it is hard to know yet which one of these he really knows. He has also started kind of a singing/babbling. When ever we watch Little Musician, he starts to sing notes like do, re and la with a weird baby tone. He is also singing with using babbling words when ever I sing to him or we watch some music videos.

WHATS NEXT
Any parent with a baby should do what ever the parent thinks is interesting and fun activity to do together. This could be singing, dancing, swimming, talking or what ever seems like fun! If I would try to do something I don't like such as walking in parks or reading poems (which I hate!), it would result to unhappy baby and unhappy parent. So instead we are doing everything that I find fun such as dancing, laughing a lot, studying languages and listening to music.

To summarize, our little one seems to be a very happy young baby who enjoys a lot of different kind of things and is great fun to be around. I think early learning has affected a lot to his personality making him positive, laughing a lot and wanting to learn more. All this early learning has been very rewarding indeed!