http://www.filthwizardry.com/

She's amazing!

You guys are terrific in always rewarding your loyal customers. I love BrillKids.

I have a favor to ask you.  Can you provide a link within the Forum Community drop down area (in the menu area above) to connect to the new forum? That would put the link at my fingertips and remind me to go there.  Also, can you put a link back to BrillKids forum in the new one?   Honestly, I'm not overly crazy about the two different forums right now, but change is always hard     Having a link to easily go back and forth would ease my transition.

If I'm blind and it's already there somewhere, just set me straight

Hi All,

I have two kids - Jonathan, my son, was born on June 26, 2007.  Julia, my daughter was born on August 4, 2009. It's been such fun having two kids, but boy is it constant.  I've not been very faithful in showing LR /LM lately to my son.  My daughter is 9 months old now, so I need to get started on that too.

Well, I look forward to meeting everyone!

Hello everyone.  My daughter Juila was born August 4, 2009. She is our second little bundle. Her energetic older brother was born June 26, 2007.  Is anyone else amazed at how different two kids from the same parents can be?  Plus the differences between boys and girls!

I look forward to seeing the direction this new forum takes.

Sidewalk chalk is terrific for active play-based learning. You can make circles of different colors and have your child hop, run, skip, jump etc into the color you call out. Great gross motor and color recognition practice.  Use more advanced color names - such as fuschia, teal, periwinkle etc to make it more challenging.

I meant to also include this link to another BrillKids forum thread.  It's not really K learning, but the resources in this list have some terrific PreK ideas.  Many of them are blogs/websites I read and use with my kids.

http://forum.brillkids.com/general-discussion-b5/which-teachingeducation-blogs-do-you-read/msg0/?topicseen

What great ideas and resources. Thank you.

I have been trying to get my 4-year old boy into Kumon or Galileo by enrolling him and buying books to teach him the writing skills.  I am doing this so that he will prepared for big school next year.  Any suggetions on how I can get him to be interested?

This might be a silly idea, but my son loves it so I'm sharing.  I put worksheets in a sheet protector or laminate them - then let my son use a dry erase marker to do the worksheet.  He loves that its a marker, he can erase it and do it again. Feels more like play than work.   If you don't have sheet protectors or a laminator - you might test plastic wrap (like saran wrap) to see if that works with a dry erase. Just tape it all to the counter.

Hi KL,

I'm currently using LR on a Windows 7 64 bit machine and haven't run into any problems.  If you want me to test some things for you, I'd be happy to do that.

My MAC is my downstairs laptop and I would MUCH rather run LR on that.  Honestly, I'm not using LR as much as I would like because I don't have a windows machine downstairs and my Vista laptop stays in my office.  So I have to brave taking the kids into my office to show them LR/LM.  Just doesn't happen everyday (or even every week) because it's not in my normal routine. 

I don't want to sully my MAC with windows and it gets too cluttered to have two laptops downstairs...anyway, enough with the irrelevant details/excuses.

Count me in as a MAC user!!

Sorry, meant to modify my previous post

oh yeah!  love my ipad and it would be GREAT to have an LM and LR for ipad!  great idea!
the doc

OOOOHH now that would be awesome.  Would I need a mac version if I had an ipad version..... well, I don't have an iPad, but this would be a great reason to get one and have it be the 'kids ipad'  He's already a pro on my iphone.

Hi KL,

I'm currently using LR on a Windows 7 64 bit machine and haven't run into any problems.  If you want me to test some things for you, I'd be happy to do that.

My MAC is my downstairs laptop and I would MUCH rather run LR on that.  Honestly, I'm not using LR as much as I would like because I don't have a windows machine downstairs and my Vista laptop stays in my office.  So I have to brave taking the kids into my office to show them LR/LM.  Just doesn't happen everyday (or even every week) because it's not in my normal routine.

I don't want to sully my MAC with windows and it gets too cluttered to have two laptops downstairs...anyway, enough with the irrelevant details/excuses.

Count me in as a MAC user!!

Hi Zaku,
All these food things can be confusing.  My heart goes out to your little one with his cough/cold allergy symptoms. Those are no fun!  Bananas and strawberries are actually two fruits that often cause allergic reactions. Nuts are a common allergen as well.  My son got terrible diaper rash when he ate strawberries. It didn’t happen right away and got progressively worse to the point it would make the skin around his bum bleed.  Now that my son is potty trained, this issue has been mostly resolved, but it still causes him some irritation.  Allergies come in different forms, so these could be presenting in your son differently.
If your doctor advises staying away from those foods – give it a try for a couple months. There are lots of other fruits – Melon, Kiwi, Apples, Grapes, Pears, Nectarines, Plums, Apricots, etc.  Yes, bananas are super convenient, but dried apricots and prunes travel easily and most kids love them. 
I never give my son juice.  He eats fresh and dried fruits and fresh vegetables.   He drinks water and milk.
If you aren’t confident in your doctor’s recommendation, you might consider getting a second medical opinion. Sometimes they can be very helpful.

    
YEA! 20 months too ~ WOW!!  That's wonderful. It is so exciting when you see your hard work paying off. You know they're learning, but it's still so nice to get the reinforcement!

   Yep! That's kids for you.   Always doing their own thing.  Sounds like normal exploration to me.

Reading eggs sounds very interesting.  We have been using starfall.com for a long time. I have been a bit disappointed in that I don’t believe it’s motivating my child to learn more reading skills. He likes to play the letter sounds, watch the sign language, listen to the music and such – so he’s enjoy it, but I haven’t seen that it’s adding any encouragement to read.   However, it is very appealing to the kids. My son has known his alphabet sounds for eons and that’s still one of his favorite areas on starfall.com.  They also incorporate fun games like memory, sorting and more.  Since it’s a bit elementary for my son now, I will look into reading eggs too.