Project 365: 4

Santa’s alphabet gift did not go to waste – little guy knows lots of his letters.

I have it on good authority that this is not particularly pedagogically popular in Germany – preschool education is focused on social and playtime skills and some parents even go so far as actively trying not to teach their kids to read before they start school (my in-laws did this – and my MIL was a grade school teacher, no less! And for those fans of American Sesame Street, you wouldn’t really recognize it here – the educational content is in general only about social lessons and asking questions and it’s less than half-an-hour).

To each his own – this is a cultural thing – but I can hardly stop encouraging my kid who gets so excited when he sees letters he knows, can I? Besides, he’s got the challenge of two languages to master. If he can read in one of them before he starts school, so much the better for him. From experience, I’ll say this much – if a kid is going to be bored in school, holding him back only delays the onset.

(Two old ladies on the U-Bahn were shocked when he announced that there was an ‘A’ and an ‘H’ in the name of the station we were going through and said he wouldn’t need to go to school – I had to laugh at that. It’s a mindset, clearly, though one shouldn’t get the idea that I’m trying to generalize the feelings of 80 million people on the topic… I just find it surprising)

We aren’t pushing the reading thing any more than we’d push anything else on a 2-year old, but given this kid’s attitude toward books and reading, I am totally encouraging it as I would any other positive thing he were interested in, and culture be damned