wow, she is doing amazing!
Her Maths is impressive.
Well done, keep it up!

We had a similar experience, it was too boring for our then 3 year old and even our 1 year old wasn't interested. What we did then was not to do the full LR sessions but just go into the categories and watch only the ones our kids liked. They really liked all the animals and wild animals and also the transportation category. They also actually really liked the stories (going to the zoo etc.). So I just let them choose the categories. Same with LM, they didn't want to do the lesson but they did like the clap along songs, so we just did the parts that they enjoyed. No idea if it had any effect but at least they had fun.

this is a great and thorough update! Thanks for your honesty. His reading seems to be great. To be honest, I think even if you had achieved nothing else in the time, the fact he went through the reading bear program and can read if he wants to is a fantastic achievement at that age! I hear you about the music. We didn't even finish Little Musician, we just lack consistency. We are based in a big city that offers plenty of high quality early music classes though, so we are very lucky in that respect. I've been meaning to post an update on my little ones for a long time, I think you inspired me to finally update my blog as well!

I was thinking of getting access a few months ago and was talking to someone who had. I had already bought and read her book "testing for kindergarten" at that time. My friend told me not to bother with the full access. I think you can really get the gist of what they do from her very affordable book and just use typical apps and workbooks for things like pattern recognition, fine motor skills, sorting and matching and lots of dialogical reading to build up vocabulary.

I must say even if it was helpful, as a psychologist myself I do actually have a problem with what she is doing in terms of publicising IQ test questions, it borders on the unethical in my opinion. You are really not supposed to access these tests and publicise the nature of the questions as it defeats the whole purpose of the test.

ELEducation, we are not strictly OPOL at all, I mainly speak my language, he mainly speaks his to the children but then amongst us we speak English 60-70% of the time and very often we are with friends when we speak English as well. plus my kids started nursery very early where it was all in English. Now we just added the fourth (my husband's second native language) via Saturday school, which is four hours each Saturday in Russian. So no, we are not strictly OPOL and even though I see how some structure makes sense, I know practically in many cultures that have two to three languages, it is very common for people to switch back and forth all the time, so don't worry about it.

enjoy and please do report back! i would have loved to attend one of these and am sure it would have made a big difference but I don't live in the US. Please share your experience!

my daughter is trilingual, my language, my husband's language, and English (as we live in the UK). My husband is bilingual himself and we just added the fourth language - we waited till she was 4 to see how she was handling the main three languages, and when there wasn't a problem, we added the fourth. The human brain seems to be set up to handle multiple languages, so don't worry about it, just make sure you have one or two that she knows very well and it sounds like that's what you're doing.

If you want to teach your older child physics, you can hardly find a more thorough and inspiring introduction than the Feynman lectures. The hardcover version costs over $150, but all the lectures are now available online in edited by Caltech written form for free. There are links to video lectures as well. I started reading his introduction to science and physics and they really are brilliant. I'd love to know how early an EL kid could get started with these in a homeschool setting, I would think around 10 or 11 years old? What do you think?

News article with link to videos:
http://io9.com/you-can-now-access-all-of-richard-feynmans-physics-lect-1627809095

Openculture link to the text books:
http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu

don't worry too much about the counting or recognising a number like 23 for now. Real math is also about quantities and understanding concepts such as more or less and how quantities change when you add and take away. Use objects that interest her, such as sweeties or lollipops or apples, and talk about how many they are, how they can be distributed fairly, how much she has now, how much she will have if you take one away and things like that.

I also play games with dice to encourage quick number recognition. So we play a game with dice (usually when another child is present) and they need to shout out the number shown on the dice quickly. This is to get them to move from counting the dots to recognising a six without counting. Also you can look at dots and see how a six is to sets of three, or a four is two sets of two.

And then there is all the stuff discussed on the other thread, of course! My 3.5 year old also enjoys the Monkey Lunchbox / Monkey Math apps!

I am reading "Mindset" now based on the recommendation above. Am loving it. I knew about the importance of a growth and a fixed mindset but reading the book in detail also made me realised how judgmental and how trapped I still am in the fixed mindset, and how my daughter probably picks up on it, which is why she boycotts a lot of my EL efforts. I have to relax and have more trust.Thanks for the recommendation!

thanks for the review! My kids weren't into YBCR at all but I have just ordered YBCD/YCCD and am hoping they will show more interest in these as so many of you say your children learnt a lot from them. My first one (3.5) still doesn't count backwards or do skip counting and I am hoping I can set better foundations with my second daughter. I will report back!

Hi Swahilimom, this sounds amazing, what a great job you have been doing! Your kids sound amazing! I look forward to reading your posts!

PokerDad, I agree she exaggerated the insignificance of parental input, probably to provoke and sell more books. The only thing she says is really that they have little direct influence and that children look up to their peers more than their parents from an early age. But of course we have a lot of indirect influence. We decide whom we visit and interact with on weekends and afternoons, we choose the house and the neighbourhood we live in, we choose their school, so we essentially choose their peers to a large extent. So my takeaway was that if I surround my kids with smart, ambitious and well-behaved peers, it will make my job as a parent much easier as I don't constantly have to counteract negative peer pressure.

[The Nurture Assumption]

The Nurture Assumption is one of my favourite books and I read it three times. There are a lot of unusual ideas in the book but once I paid attention I felt a lot of it made sense. Especially the importance of peers and socialisation. I loved the story of the boy who grew up with a chimp and how rather than him "civilising" the chimp, the boy imitated the chimp because humans have better social skills. Very impressive book. Her ideas fly in the face of EL a bit - she basically says it doesn't matter in the long run if children are in daycare or with their parents. I wanted to believe this when I was working 60 hours per week and my daughter was in full-time daycare. But my instinct said it's not true and now in hindsight I am sure it slowed down her development and made her miserable and it still haunts me. But maybe the author is right that it makes no difference in the long run.

I've been very influenced by the book and she convinced me of the importance of peers and positive social experiences. I am actually placing this above EL in how I raise my children. It's extremely important to me that they socialise a lot and make an effort to make friends and get on well with their siblings. I do believe focusing on EL only if it means robbing a child of social interaction is very harmful (but I think one can easily do both). I am more than happy to do many hours of playdates and sports and free play all day, as long as I can squeeze in my hour of EL each day (sometimes it's one, sometimes nothing, sometimes even three).

I loved the book Tiger Mom but have not read the Triple Package - somehow I assume reading the summary will tell me enough so have deprioritized it.

I am reading Teach Like your Hair is on Fire and am enjoying it - I wouldn't include it in my list of top three most influential books though. I really love Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.

Great topic! It is one of my favourite books of all times and one I definitely want my children to have read by the time they are 10 or so (not the full original version but a children's version). At what age it is appropriate depends on the version entirely, there are so many different ones. I have read Ali Baba to my 3 year old already though I agree maybe pouring fried oil over people may not be age appropriate. I will definitely try to find versions of some of the stories that are okay for 6 year olds, but that's not really EL.