We used Early Bird last year. I did not buy the teacher's guide. It all seems pretty straight forward. It is hard to believe that the teacher's guide could really say very much. Rather than just do the work sheets with pictures of things, I did try to use concrete objects that mimicked the pictures--buttons, dolls, toys, etc. Actually, after looking over the first grade Singapore Math books, I sort of question the whole need of the the kindergarten books. The first grade book covers much the same ground as Early Bird. Early Bird was created for the U.S. market and is not really part of the Singapore series. I assume they do not teach math to kindergartners in Singapore. I think they just go right into 1A and 1B. I don't think using Early Bird hurts, but I am not sure it is critical to later mathematical success. So I don't think it is worth an additional investment in an expensive teacher's guide. Keep in mind, if you use the U.S. edition for the follow on, there is a home school parent guide that is much cheaper than the teacher's guide. The Standards edition only has the teachers' guide.

Our daughter was 5 years and 4 months. I am not sure exactly how long it took us--my wife started the first lessons (the poems about the letter sounds), but doesn't remember when. That poem covers about 30 lessons. After we started the first lessons on short vowel sound words, we spent just over a year to complete the book. She has been less than enthusiastic about reading on her own, and hates it when I make her sound out a word. And she was stumbling on a lot of basic words (like long vowel/silent e words). Although we had finished the book last November, in May we began what I have called Blitz Phonics--wehave been reading through all the lessons again, about 4 or 5 pages a day. It takes us about 5 to 10 minutes.

Books like "The Bilingual Edge" argue that there is really very little research to guide families trying to raise bilingual kids. A lot of the advice that is given is just best guesses that have been circulating for years. I think the real key is to find something that works for your family and enables you to fully communicate with your kids. We are raising our daughter bilingual English and German, but have also added a little Spanish into the mix. Neither my wife nor I are native speakers of German, so we decided against either of us trying to speak German to her all the time. Instead we speak German when we can comfortably do so and speak English for more difficult situations. That being said, we tried to make sure that used used German in as many different situations and for as many topics as possible. We also repeated a lot of what we said in both languages. Speaking purely from our experience, this has worked very well. Our daughter, now 6, is very fluent (perhaps native level, if we believe our German friends--definitely better than my wife or I), and is able to switch back and forth between languages very easily. There is no mixing. (We were always very careful not to mix the two languages in the same sentence, even if the conversation shifted back and forth between English and German.) Of course, we supplemented her German with lots of contacts with German speaking families in the area, CDs, DVDs, books, and a couple of trips to Germany (none over 3 weeks). The book The Bilingual Edge argues that you need about an hour a day of stimulation in a language to develop native fluency in it. So if your children are getting some use of each language every day, our experience would suggest that speaking exclusively one language is not necessary. Personally, I would be reluctant to leave English development exclusively to the the child's outside contacts.

I did Early Bird A and B with my daughter last year. I didn't bother with the teacher's manual, or any other work books. The book is pretty self-explanatory. My daughter was doing quite well with counting (up to 100), and I was mainly interested in making sure we touched all the bases before starting 1st grade math. We zipped right through book A (we did 3 or four pages a day, when we did math--whatever we could do in about 15 minutes). Then we took the rest of the semester off. In January we started book B and also zipped right along. I just bought my copies of the first grade Singapore Math books, workbooks, and teacher's manual. Quite frankly, the content (at least for the A book) is not that different from Early Bird. I find it interesting, that Early Bird was created for the U.S. market--it is not used in Singapore. It is, I believe, based on California state standards. Moreover, (if I understood the Singapore Math website correctly) Singapore children are older when they start first grade than U.S. school children are, so they go right into the first book at age 7, not age 6, without any prep. Since the Singapore Math website also warns against pushing young children into math too early (before they are developmentally ready for the concepts), perhaps we should re-evaluate the push to do math in kindergarten. (On the other hand, we are speaking averages here, and some children are undoubtedly ready before other children.) Awareness of the Singapore practice and concern about pushing a child too soon (even though she seemed ready) were the main reasons why I went with Early Bird. We just did a little each day to make sure we had the basic concepts down, without any intent of rushing into the 1st grade book while she was still in kindergarten. So I really wouldn't worry about supplementing Early Bird. If Early Bird doesn't seem like enough, perhaps you should just work through books A and B quickly (e.g., first semester), and then start the first grade book in January.

The book you really want for your son is "CookWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful cooking with over 230 Great-Tasting Recipes" by Shirley O. Corriher. It is available from amazon: http://www.amazon.com/CookWise-Successful-Cooking-Secrets-Revealed/dp/0688102298/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1280439927&sr=8-1 The author is a food chemist who consults to all the great chefs. The book is organized by chemical principles, with recipes to illustrate the discussion, e.g., the Wonders of Risen Bread (what makes bread rise, why different kinds of flour work better than others, what additives help yeast work, etc.). The book includes desserts, meat, poultry, fish, vegetables, chocolate, etc. My wife gave this book to me. We call it the Chemistry Cook book. I highly recommend it to any aspiring cook. It is especially useful for understanding things like why your cakes fall, why your vegetables are turning an unappetizing color, or why your bread did not rise.

We used Muzzy with a 18-month old, and she loved it, so it would not be over the head of your 3-year old. By the way, if you still have a VCR player, go on e-Bay and buy old Muzzy tapes. Don't bother with any of the computer extras. The old tapes sell very cheaply, but as soon as someone has a computer disk to go along with the tape, they want to charge more. The DVDs are way overpriced, even on e-Bay.

If you use your computer, you can play Region 2 DVDs by using software that overrides the region code. The most popular is called VLC. It is freeware that is available for both PC and Mac. If you search on VLC, you could quickly find the website. The first time you play a DVD, it may take a while for the computer to break the code (don't give up too soon), but the computer will remember the next time it plays that disc and quickly load it. We buy lots of DVDs and CDs from Amazon.de. Get on their e-mail lists so that you are notified about sales. I recently bought a several things that had been remaindered. My daughter loves "Die Pfefferkoerner," and I will probably buy more episodes of this TV series. Keep in mind that Amazon.de does not charge value added tax on books, CDs, and DVDs that are exported to the U.S., and there is a flat 14 Euro delivery fee, regardless of how much you order. So when you order about 100 Euro, the delivery fee is paid for by your tax savings. So there is no recent to wait for a trip to Germany to buy things. On our trips to Germany, I buy lots of CDs from the remaindered bins in the bookstores and department stores (Karstadt is great). If it is cheap, I buy it. We have had several good hits this way, including the Playmo stories and Nick Nase (a translation of an English early reader book, Nate the Great). Because we spend lots of time driving, we turn car time into German story/song time with CDs. Perhaps your relatives can ship you things. To save postage, have them send the disks in a paper envelope instead of the plastic case. I will try to post some of our CD and DVD titles in the near future.

Deutsche Mama: I am a stay-at-home dad and do the homeschooling. To tell the truth, at the moment I am not using as much German as I would prefer. We did not use the one parent one language method (LPOL) since neither my wife or I are native speakers. We did not want to filter our relationship to her through a language that we did not speak completely fluently. So, when she was about 18 months, we both began using German with her. If we could say it in German, we did. If we could express ourselves well, we said it in English. We used the Muzzy course, watched DVDs in German, discussed English DVDs in German (it helped that we watched the same ones over and over--I was able to develop a script, as it were), sang lots of songs, and listened to lots of German CDs in the car. She was about four when we started with OPGTR. The first 30 lessons in that book are a poem, and I started the actual chapters for short vowel words in late October 2008. We finished the book in November 2009. We started the German reading in March 2010. I might of started that a little sooner, but we had a family from Germany visiting us then, and I had her cover all the vowel sounds from the reading book, since as a native speaker she could pronounce things better than I could. To tell the truth, though, I think she was deciphering the German on her own even before we started formal instruction in German. We opted to teach reading relatively early to ensure that she could develop her German vocabulary through reading and not fall way behind native speakers. (I have read that to have true native-speaker capabilities, a child has to average 8 new words a day! Since my daughter already knows all of my vocabulary--at least that which is appropriate for a child--she needs to be reading to get more exposure.) Teaching English first worked for us, but it is our daughter's dominant language, although her German is very good. Germans, both here and in Germany, claim she is fluent. All I know is, she corrects me. We have had this same discussion about reading with the other bilingual English/German families we know, but none of those families homeschool and their kids are just now hitting first grade. So I can't claim to know that teaching English first is best method. I have given some reading books to German friends who live in Germany, but none of them have opted to really use them. As I suggested in my first post, I was afraid my daughter would get too discouraged with English if she were accustomed to reading a more phonetic language first. Like most kids, she does not want to work at things. So by introducing English first, she just accepted the difficulties as part of reading. The only thing I would do different is get a better German reading book. Here are three that I have booked marked on Amazon.de, one is the same one you are looking at: --Lesen lernen leicht gemacht --Lesen und Rechtschreiben lernen: nach dem IntraActPlus-Ko​nzept --ABC der Tiere. Lesen in Silben. Leselehrgang in Druckschrift. (Lernmaterialie​n) I sought guidance at a bookstore in Bamberg on one of our trips and found out that teaching methodology for reading is in flux in Germany, at least in Bavaria. It sounded like whole language was becoming popular! The store said they carried very little because of this flux. Also, I suspect that few German parents are teaching their children to read at home, and so there is not some much demand for these books. Perhaps the shift to whole language is creating an increase demand for reading books for parents to use. There actually seem to be more on Amazon than when I first looked several years ago. We do have quite a few early reading books in German. She has used a few of them, and once we finish the Biene Maja book, we will focus on the rest. Here is a website you might find useful: http://www.rechtschreib-werkstatt.de/ It is hard to navigate (at least I as a non-native speaker find it hard), but it does have some good songs teaching sounds and pictures. See these pages at this website: http://www.rsw-portal.de/Download/tabid/84/DMXModule/397/Command/Core_ViewDetails/Default.aspx?EntryId=400 http://www.rsw-portal.de/Download/tabid/84/DMXModule/397/EntryId/33/Default.aspx

My wife and I raised our daughter (now 6) bilingually in German and English. English is our native language and we live in the U.S. We debated a long time which language to teach first when it came to reading. We opted for English on the grounds that it was the more complicated phonetic system. We were afraid that if she grew accustomed to the easy German phonetics, English reading would be overwhelmingly complicated. We used OPGTR to teach English reading. Last March we began teaching her to read German (we had finished OPGTR about 5 months before that). Because German is relatively phonetical compared to English, she quickly picked up how to read the German. We had difficulty finding a good German reading text book. I hated to order a book from Amazon Germany sight unseen. In the end, we have been using one called Die Biene Maja lernt Lesen, which we found on a trip to Germany. It is not very good, however, as it presents the letters/sounds in alphabetical order, gives a list of words with that letter/sound, and then presents a short story that includes (but is not limited to) those words. We covered the vowels sounds first, and since the German consonants are not that dissimilar to English consonants, our daughter soon was able to read each of the short stories. We are continuing to go systematically through the book, just to make sure we explicitly cover all the sounds.

We also just did this chapter. This is not the first time that our pronunciation has differed from that used in the book. Since my wife shudders at some of the pronunciations I use, I won't recount the others. Of the five words in the current lesson, neither my wife nor I pronounce forest, foreign, or orange with the sound proposed by OPGTR. So I told my daughter that not everyone pronounces these words the same and our family uses the "or" in door sound for these words, but that we use the "ar" in car sound for borrow and sorrow. I wish OPGTR explicitly noted more regional variations.