Hi, Babymum!
Sure!
I usually explain to my students that music is like a train. Each 'cart' has the same amount of seats. At the the beginning of the music you can find 2 numbers: on the top is the amount of 'seats' of each car and on the bottom is a value-duration of each seat.
Here is the most common 'seat sizes'.
1 seat is for an average adult - *quarter note*
1 seat also could be shared by 2 kids - *eighths*
2 seats is for chubby one
- 'half note'
etc
The are a lot of other stories like this in our Academy.
Join us to learn!
As for your question about the vertical. Children look at their toys from different perspective and do not have any problems recognizing every part of it. In fact, looking at the Grand Staff vertically keep the right hemisphere tuned and contributes to spatial thinking needed in math in future.
I Recommend you to look at brill kids 3-year-old boy reading horizontal notes after such training:
http://forum.brillkids.com/teaching-your-child-music/3-8-yrs-old-and-nutcrackers-from-softmozart/ 
Digg
