Hello, everyone!
I’m a stay-at-home mom to a 15-month-old boy. We live in New Jersey. I first found out about BrillKids thanks to Larry Sanger’s “How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read”, and I first found out about Larry Sanger thanks to my Quora feed. One thing led to another and for the past two weeks I have spent my nights reading through this forum and getting more and more excited about EL. I have been practically going bankrupt getting all the books and DVDs you, the forum participants, got me so excited about. In order to complete my financial ruin, I have just purchased LR English + Chinese, LMa and LMu. And since the courses are currently downloading, I thought I’d stop by to say hi.
So here are some notes on where we are and what we’re planning.
READING. We will be doing LR, since my son seems to enjoy it, even though he doesn’t really focus on the phonics or the sight words. We’ve been showing him YBCR DVDs 4-5 times a week since he was about 9 months. We have also played with the sliding flash cards, which he used to love. He still enjoys the DVDs, so we show them to him occasionally, but - honestly - I haven’t seen any signs he can read any of the words, so I’m beginning to expose him to phonics. He adores “Meet the Phonics - Letter Sounds” and LeapFrog “Letter Factory”. We started looking at Starfall, too. We also just got the refrigerator magnets. We have foam letters for bath and wooden blocks. I’ve also been using the finger-under-the-words trick when I’m reading to him. The plan is to wait until he is familiar with the alphabet and letter sounds and then move onto the Reading Bear.
I’d also like to read more books to him, but I’m having problems keeping him interested. There are some books that keep his attention (“Where’s Spot”, “Where’s Baby’s Belly Button” and “Bright Baby Colors”, for example), but most of the time he turns the pages before I have a chance to finish reading them! I’d be very interested to hear any suggestions for concrete books we should try as well as any advice on how to make our reading sessions more exciting.
MATH. We will be doing LMa, since he liked the sample lessons, and I am planning on reading “Marshmallow Math” to get more ideas.
LANGUAGES. We speak English at home. My husband is fluent in Mandarin, and he sometimes speaks it to our son. In order to increase my son’s exposure to the language, however, we will be doing LR Chinese. (Can’t wait to learn more Mandarin myself this way!) My parents see my son a lot and they speak mostly Polish to him. I will look into doing some reading lessons in Polish later. I am myself currently studying Spanish, so I thought of introducing it to my son as well, but I’m not sure if 4 languages won’t be an overkill.
MUSIC. We will be doing LMu. My son loved the sample lessons! I was really surprised. He even started humming while going through the solfeggio exercises. Since he showed so much interest, I picked up "You Can be a Musician: A Defense of Music†and got inspired to look into teaching my son the piano probably starting at around 2.
PE. I have Doman’s book on Physical Excellence, and I’m planning on studying it a little more to get some ideas. Interestingly, my son is a very late walker. He’s just beginning to try to walk without support at 15 months, even though he was very early crawler (6 months), and cruiser (7 months). So I definitely think I need some help learning how to help him develop his physical potential. I’m thinking of starting swimming lessons, too, in the spring, since he enjoys water very much.
Finally, I love this forum and I’d love to connect with other EL parents in my area to organize play dates and do other fun activities together. We’re in the NYC metro area, so I’m sure there are other EL-ers around here, but I am yet to find them. I will be posting on the local forum soon and also reaching out to some parents I know to see if I can get them interested in EL.
Anyway, again, hello to everyone. Can’t wait to chat with many like-minded parents on this forum!
