Thanks, cokers4life!

Things are busy, and going great. At 26mo, she's just starting to read her favorite words-only books to herself.

Yeah, C4L, your comment about favorite-topics making for solid wins really rings true. Nation had a lot of fun poking around our truck's engine bay and peeking at the underbody. Differential, axle, brakes, radiator, fuel tank, etc. are super-high-yield staple vocab for reading, typing, or anything! Now her favorite is the powwow songs by the Black Lodge Singers.

Here's a video playlist with a video every few months showing her progress over two years!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3IrHiiEuRU&list=PLks_0NClxrGrHrHu8LGuCJ2Izek5YJhlL&index=1

That's awesome, spaceman. I'm glad the person is benefiting -- more power to you and her!

No idea what else might be helpful. I'd think that the combination of eye-candy high-contrast flashcards, with the personal interaction, probably are great.

Maybe transition to simple landscapes if the hi-contrast cards start getting overused / a little boring?


-Steven

Hi FunGran,

Much encouragement with your Early Learning efforts!

I'm an EL recipient/alum as well as an EL parent now. My mother started me on the Doman program when I was around 20 months, and my older brother around 35 months, and I feel like we both benefited much from it.

I don't have personal experience starting EL with 2-3year-old's, as we started my daughter around 6 months old. But I do feel like my brother and myself definitely got a head start on reading and math from my mother's efforts.

Looking forward to hearing about your experience!

Cheers
-Steven B

Hi folks,

We've been rocking out here, kinda isolated in the EL aspect, in Minot, North Dakota. Would love to get in touch with any EL-oriented folks in the region!        

We recently decided to start going internet-public with some of our daughter Nation's successes, to help start conversations with folks around here. It's nothing especially surprising from the other results on this forum and other EL communities, but you know how it goes.

Here's a video from four months ago at 13m/o.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/pma1rprne2cyv3s/2016-09-19%2023.45.27.mp4?dl=0

Things are generally pretty similar now at almost 16.5m/o, although interest is flagging a little bit recently. Book reading sessions with the frantic focus shown here used to happen two or more times every day from 13m/o to 15m/o. Sometimes they'd last for a whole hour with nonstop energy. Now it's only every other day, and they go for one to five minutes before she gets interested in something else.

We did LR English and Chinese, and LM. She finished Semesters 1&2 of LR Chinese with interest all the way through, although she was getting kinda bored of it by the end. English was lagging behind, so we haven't finished the last half of LR English semester 2 yet. She'd rather play with the buttons on the CD player boombox. We got all the way through math with lots of interest, four types of operations, up to three operands etc, with a similar tapering off to disinterest.

I think the slowdown over the last month might be because we didn't ever implement the "puzzles" to challenge her so I think that may have she lost interest for that reason. "Which one's seventeen, this one, or this one?" Or, "Which card has 'ball'?" Never did that. We have been scrupulously avoiding "testing"... but now I'm thinking we should reconsider that strategy and start adding some "puzzle/problem-solving" back in to make things interesting and challenging again. She sometimes decides to demonstrate recognition of some written words for body parts like Tou ("head" in Chinese), but we haven't started that kind of thing systematically yet. Her receptive listening comprehension has a much bigger vocabulary, but I haven't gone about trying to measure that.

Current list of words produced in speech every day or two:
Baby, Bee, Mama, Papa, Pop, Ba (Chinese for , Auntie, Up, Down (pronounced "bauu"), Wah!, Hua (Chinese for "flower"), Ball, Zhe-ge (Chinese for "this one", accompanied by finger-pointing), Go!, head shaking for "no", Meimei ("little sister" in Chinese - that's what her older cousin calls her), Lalala (when we're reading/singing through the "Deck the Halls" book).

A dozen words or so, I guess. She's imitated other things we've said before, but those were mostly one-off events.

While LR English and Chinese used regular scripts for those languages, I have also been showing Nation homemade books (mostly nursery rhymes in English) written in Gregg Shorthand, as in the video. I put in a lot of effort learning the Anniversary style of Gregg myself... so high hopes that it might start paying off when we start her learning to write!

Anyways, thought I'd share. XD

Cheers,
Steven

Hi Vika,

I am using LR and LM with my daughter and she absolutely loves them. My daughter is just turning 1, so I haven't tried BK with a 2y/o. But, my mother did the Doman flash card systems with me (25+ years ago...), starting at 1.5 y/o, and I remember reading lots of chapter books at 6y/o. So 2 y/o is a wonderful time to start Early Learning!!!

In terms of BK's offerings, I suspect that they will work great for a 2y/o. However since I would suppose the reaction of a toddler to new things is so increasingly unpredictable, and changes quickly over time, you may want to familiarize yourself with the customization options in LR and/or LM.

If you get a LR or LM version with a "PRO key" then you can modify pretty much anything about the lessons you want - I haven't tried out more than a quarter of the customization options but they are extensive.

In addition to using BK software, my wife and I went to one of the Doman week-long parent-training sessions. They talk about starting at different ages and how to tweak the flashcards programs for kids starting in diverse developmental situations.

Basically, if a child already knows a bunch of vocab and some phrases, then you will want to take advantage of that to keep them excited and engaged. So maybe slim each lesson down to fewer sub-sessions, decreasing down the total number of cards-per-lesson, and do two "days" of lessons per day, until the vocab feels new. Or you just skip some of the initial days. Or you could try a more involved way of accelerating through the initial material if it feels too slow. Or maybe it'll work just fine out of the box.

But make sure not to make the lessons overlong based on the child's reaction! IAHP & the Domans preach to start with super-short lessons, so the lesson ideally stops while the kid is still pleading for more.

But generally, I think the BK lessons are set up with pretty good multimedia content for differential instruction. There's a big-font printed word and a picture that's great for all ages, but in addition to repetitions of that particular word there's also an accompanying relevant sentence of spoken audio. The spoken audio sentence probably goes right over a 1y/o user's head, that might be an especially enjoyable part for an 2y/o using the same card.

And then there's the read-along stuff with karaoke-style visuals. I haven't used it yet but I saw it in some of the youtube vids.

So, while I don't have experience with trying it out with 2y/o's, if we had adopted a 2y/o instead of birthing our daughter, still the BK softwares would still be my starting point.

Hope that helps!
Cheers,
Steven

Hi All,

I thought I'd post a (SOLVED) update for this thread.

BK tech support was very helpful and was all-ready to give me a virtual troubleshooting session where their staff (apparently who lives at some timezone in the British Isles or West Africa) would log in to my computer using some fancy software and get LR to install from afar.

While installing the chat client to work with the tech support session, I found that my computer didnt have Adobe Flash yet, and furthermore it refused to install.

Digging around, I found that there is an issue with Window$ Vista Service Pack 2, where you can't install certain things b/c of some incompatible SHA256 certificate and the length of security keys etc. When I finally got the right update installed, I was able to install Flash and subsequently LR as well.

issue: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2050155?start=0&tstart=0
update: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2763674

Backwards compatibility: another reason I run Linux whenever possible! But Kezia and BK were ready to go the extra mile, much respect to them.

Regards,
Steven

Hi Kezia,

Hehe, if it would only be that easy...  No, I didn't click on cancel or anything, the box pops up all on its own. I've repeated this issue a half dozen times.

And the install process restarts if I choose "No", but the same problem recurs.

Thanks,
Steven

Hi LR team,

When I try to install LR (free trial version) it cancels out during the install process - screenshot attached.

Little Math works fine.

I'm running Vista, Service Pack 2, on a Sony Vaio laptop.

Any suggestions?

Much thanks
Steven Bhardwaj

Wow, they're really nice!!

The number counting one is awesome, hope to see more soon!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PUVVXZLIrY

Bienvenidos guille_retro!

Soy de los EEUU, pero me alegro de disfrutarme del idioma in cualquier situation.  

Me parece que tal vez, hacer un hilo nuevo para soportar a una pregunta nueva in su propia lugar, puede ayudar a la comunidad a organizar sus registros/anotaciones?

Pero en todo caso estoy listo yo...  

Saludos,
Steven

Yeah it's a little cryptic, but on p139 of HTTYBTR, (at the beginning of "The Third Step" of the eponymous HTTYBTR chapter) there's the following quote:

"Even with a basic vocabulary of fifty to seventy-five words the possible combinations are many..."

But for better or for worse, if there's anything to be said about the IAHP books, I think I would say that they avoid giving direct age-pegged curricular advice... like the plague! Sometimes it gets a little frustrating and leads to a less-than-organized flow of the text, but I guess there is some diplomatic value to this aspect of their approach given the diversity of kids at any particular age...

Ah! I've been meaning to reply to this ever since it was posted... but haven't gotten around to it.

I have wanted to ask the folks on the forum the same thing... but then I figured that I'm well positioned to give a response myself... which I found very difficult to do!

Thus I have found that tracking a time analysis of an infant caregiver is a difficult thing to do solo... at least I have had great difficulty as I have tried over the past three weeks!!!

I would go so far as to suspect that the schedules out there are done by super-organized people with strong "get it done" focus. Unfortunately my focus tends to wander freely like an ethereal Maria from the Sound of Music... "How do you catch a cloud and pin it down..."

All that to say, it's hard to quantify how much of my (full time parent) time is spent on (1) EL precisely, and how much on (2) basic infant-bodily-function-management, and how much on (3) my own personal pursuits. Especially because all those three are so mixed and muddled up.

I outlined what I see as the main scheduling difficulty with teaching reading infants to read in the following link. Less about time spent, more about availability and time spacing. I think the total time committment is really just <1m for each session. But I'll keep trying to keep a time journal and post more moving forward!

http://forum.brillkids.com/general-discussion-b5/anyone-attempt-full-doman-program-%28reading-knowledge-math-and-exercise%29/msg107374/#msg107374"]

Interesting about mandalas. I watched the videos in the link below - I suppose that's what you're talking about?
http://www.homeeducation.sg/videos

Have you checked out the Josh Foer TedTalk and the techniques used in the World Memory Championships?

I've been following this stuff for some time and plan on using their techniques for memory stuff.

The primary methods used by WMC competitors are:
- Linked list (I think this is a primary one for Shichida)
- Peg System
- Memory Palace

I would recommend the website http://artofmemory.com/ for info on how the WMC competitors train. I'm excited about training myself with these mnemonic methods and also about helping DD learn them... so I would be glad to talk about it more!

Cheers
Steven

-------------------edits below----------------

Ah, I see that this mandala stuff is somewhat different from the WMC methods. Maybe the mandala games would be a precursor to, and eventually support, the other visual mnemonics!

Hmmm, in a separate thought, I would prefer to call the mandala work "imaginative visual memory" rather than "photographic memory"? Just it's my understanding that the brain compresses images into outlines and fills like jpg's or other algorithms, so what we're actually remembering is more like a cartoon than like a photograph.

But looks good! I'll have to come back to this in a year or two.

Hi Gemma,

I love your process. I've been doing 3 sets (in between your 1 and Doman's 5), and have actually also been doing a little bit of whiteboard as you describe! I write song lyrics on a huge whiteboard and point as I sing them sometimes. But I like your play-integrated whiteboard use better, and will look to try that more.

I think that doing fewer word sets is probably just fine, Zipf's law works so much in your favor!

I can't see why isolated single-word flashes would interfere with sessions. If you've "extracurricularly" flashed a word a lot, maybe you could retire it after 4 or 3 days instead of 5?

Doman says to start couplets after 50 words. We're at word #103 and haven't gotten around to couplets yet... but I also haven't made card number #104 yet so maybe we'll start very soon if I get a round tuit. 

Cheers,
Steven

Hi all,

Great to hear that it can be done! So the issue for us isn't so much the aggregate time it takes to review the cards with our 3m/o, 13-lb LO... but rather the 15min spacing is the tough part!

We've cut down from the 5 sets of 5 cards, to 3 sets of 5 cards. So that's 3 sets x 3 reps = 9 reading words sessions per day. We're also attempting a physical program, and red dot cards. So that's 6 dot-card sessions per day, and a combo of short crawling sessions and miscellaneous "vestibular" rough-housing on the bed.

She's addicted to yoga-ball bouncing and thus has a strong core, and she can support her weight standing pretty well when I prop her up, but no recognizable crawling yet. She's on a routine of 3oz pumped milk, which tends to rotate at about 2 hours on average. (After 3oz she rejects additional milk more often than not.)

The issue is, it seems I can't give her flash cards when she's hungry, sleepy, during the ~10m reflux danger period after feeding, or when she really just wants to bounce on the yoga-ball or otherwise rough-house. And the reading sessions are supposed to be spaced at minimum 15min, right? I have been doing reading and math back-to-back, so the reading is the bottleneck.

All that usually cuts it down to 2 or 3 reading sessions *maximum* in each ~2-hour rotation. Fewer if I want breakfast or have some other tasks...  Anyways, that's why I cut the reading sessions down to 9 instead of 15: it often takes me up to six or more feeding rotations to even get the 9 reading sessions done, and that's most of the day.

We have a big stack of second-hand "bits"... but it's looking at me with a baleful eye these days...

Any suggestions folks might have about how to fit more in? Orsi26, does this kind of sessions-per-feeding-cycle breakdown seem typical at this age? Does it get easier as feeding cycles consolidate into fewer feedings per day? (Is there light at the end of the infant tunnel?? LOL)

Cheers,
Steven