I have been stuck for ideas, too. My son just turned 3 and now the family are asking what he wants for Christmas 

My christmas present for him this year is something I am sure he will love - a hand held hoover. Not a toy one, but a 'real' one that should actually clean my floors! It cost not much more than the novelty crumb collectors, but is much more powerful. He always wants to help clean the floor, and usually sweeps the crumbs quite effectively over his shoulder while trying to get them in the dustpan - this should prove a much more exciting way of helping me out (and hopefully create much less mess for me to clean up after he's 'helped' )

I'm telling friends and family that lego or dressing up clothes are the best present options - you can't have too many of either!

Sonya, you beat me - I completely forgot last night to put about the Latinum program! I started using his podcast, but he now has a series of (very short) youtube films, too. Love it! We will definitely be using this, too!

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/r5UPjPrNbT0&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/r5UPjPrNbT0&rel=1</a>

I have read reviews on Song School Latin and it sounds good, but I am not planning on using it. I have always intended to teach Latin (because I loved it so much in school) and there will always be a special place in my heart for the Cambridge Latin Course. I have such fond memories of Caecilius and his naughty dog...

I was so excited to find they have released a primary Latin course called Minimus. I can't wait until my son is old enough for it - it is written in comic-book format and there is all sorts of historical information, myths, even a play to act out! You can get a CD with the pronunciations and stories read out, too. They introduce some grammar as well - great for English language practice, too! It focuses a lot less on grammar than it could, but introduces it in the context of how it was used in the story which makes it a more natural way of learning than rote conjugation drills! My brother used it in an afterschool Latin club and seemed to enjoy it (though at age 9 the most we could get out of him was 'it's ok' ).

Because it is a UK published Latin course, I haven't seen any mention of it on homeschool blogs so I thought I'd add it as an option for you to think about. As far as I know, it is available in the US, though.

You can get a taster here: http://www.minimus-etc.co.uk/resources_page.htm

For those of you teaching piano/keyboard how do you encourage/help your child to play with more than one finger?

My son is 3 and desperately wants to play his keyboard but he either carefully presses notes with his pointer finger or he "plays" with his whole hand and bashes at the keys, hitting notes at random with 2 or more fingers on each key. I often show him how I play two adjoining notes with separate fingers and he watches me do my practice scales but he just doesn't seem to 'get' what he has to do. I know that hitting the right note with even one finger is better than most children his age could do, but I have always encouraged him to do things properly (like pen grip) so that he doesn't need to re-learn the skill again when he's older.

We are using SM but although he loves the note-recognition games he doesn't like anything where he needs to put more than one finger on the keyboard at once. He just gets frustrated that his fingers 'don't listen'!

Has anyone here had similar problems? What advice do the piano teachers among you have?

Thanks

I've put up another post with more detail about how we do the patterning exercise at the beginning.

If anyone's interested, its here: http://dancingwithdinos.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/patterns.html

Congrats! That's so great. I am so pleased for you

I have written a review of the K program so far here: http://dancingwithdinos.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/not-another-maths-program.html

My son has been a reluctant reader. He never learned with whole words - partly because he went through several long phases of refusing to look at LR or other reading cards, partly because when he was interested I never managed to show it consistently for long. I think that might be why he kept getting bored with it, actually... though it may be because he thought that the sole purpose of the program was teaching animal sounds and once we passed those lessons he didn't see the point

Anyway, now he has just turned three. He learnt his letter sounds about a year ago, but has refused all my attempts to teach him how to sound them together to read words. I know he knows the theory well enough because we've watched the leapfrog talking words/codeword capers dvds HUNDREDS of times over the last year and he memorized the letter sounds after a very few repeats of the letter factory dvd. He just never tried to sound anything out. He would sing the phonics rules songs but never apply them. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get him interested in anything more than letter sounds.

Last week I decided to give Reading Bear a try. We tried a couple of months ago and he wasn't interested. This time, he sat through the presentations - I started to get hopeful. We did one long presentation every day (no matter how bored he appeared to be getting, he wouldn't let me close the window until he finished the whole set) and have now covered the short vowels except o (because the accent difference confused him too much) a couple of times each. At first he would squirm and appear uninterested (though he insisted he wanted to watch) and gradually over a couple of days he started to mimic the voice-over.

Within a week he started independently sounding out and reading CVC words. I am thrilled and hope that he'll pick up all the other lessons this quickly! I've attached a video I sneaked of him while we were going through the short o presentation for the first time. He might be slow right now, but I'm proud of the way he figured it out by himself!

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/LHjCKwwBPCQ&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/LHjCKwwBPCQ&rel=1</a>

They've always come with the postman for me, but it takes a couple of weeks for the free delivery to arrive. I think the door-to-door option is for if you want it fast.

That would be the post that I'm writing tomorrow (because it is way past my bedtime now )

Thanks - you've inspired me to write the next post that I've been planning for two weeks now  It is always nice to know that people actually read and enjoy

Thank you.

The image cards I made with coloured circles of card and the images from the Soft Mozart cards (available for free here: http://www.softmozart.com/teaching/how-to-get-started/try-it-for-yourself.html)

I can't find the site that I printed the staff flashcards from, but here is something very similar that you could use: http://chentheresa.squarespace.com/storage/music-flashcards/Music-Note-Name-Flashcards.pdf

I have the note names in a pdf file, which I can email you if you pm me your address. It was simply made in a word table so feel free to make your own.

For the piano keys, I simply printed off several versions of a keyboard clipart file like this one: http://www.clker.com/clipart-4477.html and coloured it in with felt pens.

To make the large staff for Twinkle Twinkle, I printed off several pages of this http://susanparadis.wordpress.com/2008/11/21/giant-staff/ which I cut down the middle and added the notes with felt pens.

Hope this helps

I've been thinking about this myself. I would love to homeschool, but at the moment I just can't see it being an affordable option

I do worry that my son will simply be wasting his time in school, but the schools in our area are some of the best state schools in the country so its not going to be the worst kind of education. I worry that we won't be able to do very much if we're afterschooling, but I guess a little is better than nothing. Even only an hour a day could dramatically improve his maths/language/music skills or allow us to focus on topics from school in so much more depth. It won't be the education I dream of giving him, but he will have the 'normal' school experience that the rest of my family would try and guilt me into giving him anyway...

Saying that, I had no EL/afterschooling experience (apart from reading confidently by age 5) and I was so bored in school! I am one of those people that picks things up very easily (and forgets almost as quickly, so I can pass tests with good grades but couldn't tell you the answers a couple of weeks later) and would often be found staring out of the window, having completed the work. Especially in year 8/9 maths and science (non-experimental lessons, at least) my friend and I would complete the assigned work in 10-20% of the lesson time and be left to occupy ourselves - we were so bored we asked for extra work and were repeatedly denied 'so as not to get ahead of the group' and once even got told off for doing maths homework because we were told to work from the textbook for 30mins and completed too many questions! Not the most supportive teachers - we ended up founding a school science club and spending our lunch hours building miniature rockets and discussing the literary works of Tolkien. I also spent a lot of time after school trying to teach myself things like foreign languages and reading Heiroglyphs - I would have loved to have that be encouraged (and even structured into my daily routine) by my Mum, but she left me to study independently so that she could focus on my four younger siblings and once I was 'old enough' stopped even checking I had finished my homework, which allowed me to get into all sorts of bad study habits.

So I console myself with the fact that if I can encourage focused homework/study time for even a small portion of the day, I can provide my son with the learning support that I never had. Not quite the ideal education I imagine for him, but at the very least better than my own. And if he is bored in school, at least it is because he knows the lesson!

We have been watching a lot of the Magic School Bus lately (as a reward for good behaviour) and one that we've seen several times shows what happens inside your body when you have a sore throat.

The timing couldn't be better - my son has just come down with a cough and sore throat. I was struggling to get him to go to bed on his own last night - he's always clingy when he's ill - but did so by telling him that he needs to rest so that his white blood cells can fight the infection He was talking about killing bacteria when I gave him the medicine, too!

I love when his advanced knowledge helps me get things done without an argument 

We have the Chinese and Japanese versions - my son loves them (when he's in the mood for Chinese or Japanese at least!) but I can't say anything about English. I am seriously tempted by the new pack of flashcards they have released to go with the dvds, but will have to wait until I have another baby as my son doesn't really need any more learn-to-read materials 

If you become a member (for free!) they have member's offers and also periodically send out discount coupons - the best I remember was 40%