Nicholas, age 2, UK

I feel like I'm cheating by saying he's 2, when he'll be 3 in one month...

We have had the SM software for about a month, and are not using it nearly as much as I would like. This is mostly my fault - I don't always care to spend ten minutes setting up the keyboard for 3-4 minutes of playing

He is making some progress, though. Although not really interested in the Gentle Piano (we might play it once) if he decides to play, he hits almost all the notes and averages a score of around 13 with his right hand.

I don't want music to be a battle, so mostly we only play the Guess Key game for a couple of minutes. He now has absolutely no prompting or help from me. So long as he can keep his focus on the game (very tricky at this age!) he gets every note in plenty of time. Although he only focuses intently for about half of his playing time, I can see a slow improvement in his concentration.

Away from the keyboard, he is blossoming musically! He sings the 'do-re-mi' song with great enthusiasm and recognises all the card prompts. We are also using Little Musician; he sings the notes and claps in rhythm. He recognises 3 different chords and can sing 'Twinkle Twinkle' in solfege with almost no prompts. He sings all day long, and amuses me by making up songs that include scales

Here we are, rocking up the solfege!

We've finally got back on track with SM learning. We had a couple of months off remembering that you can only play keyboard if you use gentle hands and now we're back and he loves his keyboard more than ever!

Yesterday we played Guess Key for the first time in a while and he scored 28 in three minutes. Today he got 49 in three minutes Just goes to show how out of practice we are!

I also convinced him to give Gentle Piano a proper go - he started RH on Hot Cross Buns yesterday and his best score (of three plays) was 12/15. He even gave it a shot with three fingers. Today he played four times, but only one-fingered, and got two 13s and a 14. I even managed to get a video where he wasn't playing the fool