Linzy,
Yes thanks for this thread.
I have 3 doing piano regularly. One with Down Syndrome who is 4 1/2 and one 2 1/2 and one 21 months. I think girls are easier to teach than boys. That is my current experience. The oldest and youngest are girls, the middle is a boy. We’ve been at this for over a year - with slow but steady progress with the oldest. She is now playing with one hand using all of her fingers. She has no trouble reading all the notes. Down Syndrome causes some issues with muscle tone, we have had to spend a bit of time trying to get her finger to do what we want them to. She will practice 20 - 40 minutes depending on how tired she is.
My son, the middle one, has had progress off and on. He played through HCB the first time at 18 months. Then nothing…not one single thing but banging for 6 months. Then I had a really good where I got some good footage of him or no one would have believed me. Then nothing for 6 more months. He’s now practicing fairly regularly. Nearly everyday, but sometimes he will practice more than once. Usually not more than 10 minutes at a time, but some days he’ll go 30. That is when he is asking to play guess key school. He likes to feed the spider and then tell me how Mr.Oops is getting pretty hungry.
Ana, the youngest, has all the note icons memorized and played through HCB the first time about a month ago.She will play and try very hard some days, but right now she is very interested in how sound works. She likes to go to the keyboard sing a note (she always calls it La) and then press a key until she finds the one she is singing and then she will look at the stickers and call out the note she just sang. Her father is a decent musician, was startled when she did this at home on their piano - minus the note announcement because they don’t have stickers. She is developing perfect pitch on her own by trial and error.
After reading Hellene’s book several times and doing other research I’ve some to a couple conclusions, which should be pretty obvious those those of us in this forum, but we lose sight of them. 1. I just need to keep putting in input and they will, at some point, let me know what they know. And they probably will not do it one second before they want to. 2. If I keep putting it in, they are learning even when it does’t seem like they are even listening to me. 3.It is way easier to read than it is to write. It is easier to learn read music than to play piano. The kids have to make their fingers do an awful lot of stuff. So, patience is in order. It may be that it isn’t that they want no music, they just don’t want to work so hard playing music.
One of the things I learned from a mom on a Suzuki violin forum is that I am expecting too much too soon. Some kids are physically ready for the demands of playing at 2 and 3 - other kids are not. But, we still take lessons. You take lessons because you are preparing their minds and the ears for playing. extra years are worth a lot down the road. There are several Asian moms on the forum that make their children take out the violin listen to the CD while holding the violin, and then put the violin back the proper way. They do this for several months and attend lessons. That is all they get done. But it works. Maybe all you need to do now is teach respect for the instrument. You can have your child sit at the keyboard and not bang while they listen to gentle piano tunes in the song mode. ( I don’t necessarily mean you guys, but others who may see this.) What to do when they won’t practice, do LM, or anything: listen to the music alphabet CD. It is ear training. The kids who listen the Suzuki CD the most progress the fastest. The nice thing about the CD is that the notes aren’t just played they are sung, so the children are training their voices as well. Because they are sung in solfege they are memorizing the scales. This isn’t stuff they have to learn later, it becomes part of who they are. We have it on in the car and in the house as much as I can stand it. When we don’t have that on, we have the Suzuki one on.
The card work is very important also. While the song is playing, find and place the cards in order. Eventually move that to placing the right notes on the staff. You don’t have to do all of the songs, but work on one or two a few times per week. And work through the entire CD. In the file sharing section of SM there is a ton of resources to do this with ideas to make it fun. We carry the solfege circle ( int he files sharing section) in the car and take it into the Dr. Office or any place where I think we might have to wait and we do the various Solfege scales from the CD and point to them on the circle.
I think it important to remember that Hellene’s goal is to teach music literacy using the piano and software as the primary tools. They are quick and effective. So, even if you are not progressing in the playing department for various reasons, you can still do the rest. My oldest son just painted an old board we had lying around white with electric tape staff lines so that the kids could start putting the note heads on the staff - I want them to be able to sing the songs they are learning in solfege and place the notes on the staff in the right spots. You can do the same thing with regular paper or card stock and laminate it. I think of this as teaching another language not necessarily playing piano. But we are learning the piano…
As far as LM goes, it is helpful, very helpful, but not necessary. Soft Mozart will do much of the same things but it is not as easy as pointing a clicking. As a busy mom, I like the point and click nature of everything BK does. When you are tired you are more likely to pull out a BK lesson than drag out a bunch of cards and a staff or hook your laptop up the the keyboard. But,there is something valuable about taking the cards, handling them and putting them in order. Or placing notes on the staff yourself. It is entirely a different way of learning.
This is Ana at 19 months - my son is trying to be her teacher…I was holding the camera with one hand and trying to restrain him with the other.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvfBSJw7SHQ
I have a couple new ones I need to get uploaded and will post those later…
how well they are doing . our kids are almost the same age . My youngest only now is accepting lessons , he is actually inspired by his sister success and started asking me to show him how to play when before he refused any lessons . he loved playing by himself , hitting notes and singing solfege , but wouldn’t have a lesson with mama , till now , My daughter loved to watch her own video on you tube , so we decided we will practice pieces every week and by the end of the week , we will make a video and posted for Helena , friends and grandma ( lives far ) to watch them play . I shared our very first video on facebook and she was happy from the positive response she got from her grandma and aunties . now f she knows she has to play more to continue to impress them 
) and they played “Do Do Do” with their right thumb and sang along. The cartoon DVD that accompanies the course had a corresponding video which we watched first. It showed a bunch of animals riding a roller coaster at a theme park. In between the “do do do’s” of the song the kids were instructed to lift their hands up and make them loop de loop, say “Whee!” and come back down again to find do. So cute! Aside from the “extras” that helped make this one note song fun, I think SM starts out too hard with Hot Cross Buns for the very youngest learners. At least when we initially tried it at age 2 or so. But having a song of just one note might not be very engaging without all of the “fluff,” so I don’t know. The next song DD learned in class was “do re do” and then finally “do re mi, mi re do.” But that first one note song was fun for even Owen to play at home and it gave them a very good feeling of achievement right off the bat.