Reading
This morning, we had a little downtime after getting ready, before it was time to take Olive to Kita1. I pulled out my phone to do a little browsing; Olive noticed this and reminded me that she would really like a phone of her own, maybe for Christmas. I told her no, she had to be able to read and write before she can have her own phone.
"I can read! Look!" She then fetched one of her favorite books from her bedroom, and proceeded to do a pretty good rendition of it from pure memorization. Unfortunately for her, I am absolutely certain that this was memory and not reading, because as it happens, this particular book is written in German, and she was telling it to me in English2.
Olive has always liked a story, but these days they're also a formalized part of her bedtime routine: depending on how early we start the process, she can have as many as three, but no fewer than one, story. If you ask her about that routine, she might sometimes forget to mention the donning of PJs or the brushing of teeth, but she never, ever forgets the story.
It's interesting to see the way her tastes in books have changed over time. We used to read quite a lot of Dr. Seuss, but these days, she turns him down: the books she liked just as she was coming into language are too simple and familiar now, and the rest of them are tainted by association, even if she now has the attention span to properly enjoy them. These days, the best books are the ones which rhyme less, but document some exciting process. In practice, this means that we're learning a lot about the lives and routines of police34 and firefighters these days.
Oddly enough, Olive doesn't seem to have much desire to play as a police officer or firefighter, despite loving to read about them. Really, she has only one profession to play as. "I am the doctor," she will tell you. "Lie down: you are sick! I will check you." Out comes her red plastic doctor's bag full of red plastic medical implements, which she uses one by one to inspect you. In the end, the diagnosis is almost always the same: "You're ok now!"
Not so many kids end up in the profession they dream of as a child. Even when I did precisely that, I then left it at the first opportunity. Still, there's a part of me which would be really happy if she did decide to go into medicine, twenty-some years from now.
Kita is the German abbreviation for "Kindertagesstätte", which is pre-academic daycare: it gets the kids used to a school building and a classroom with lots of kids and one or two teachers; the kids learn life skills, socialization, and language. This is a relatively new thing for Olive; until a few weeks ago, she was going to a "Tagesmutter" instead, which has much younger kids in smaller groups, and is more of a home-like environment.
This felt very much like an incident from my own childhood, when I was learning the piano: my teacher had assigned me a little song to work on. I actually practiced that week, and felt good when I demonstrated it. My teacher was less impressed: "You played it very nicely, Peter, except you transposed it to C. It was written in D; you were supposed to get comfortable using the black keys."
Given recent events in the US, it would feel uncomfortable using the police there as role models, so all the police we're reading about are German Polizei. One interesting difference between police in the two nations: in the US, police can be commissioned with as few as six weeks of training. Here, they need two years at minimum.
Being kids' books, there's not a huge concern for accuracy. Even so, I think my absolute favorite scene in any of them has a police helicopter surveying a wreck on the highway: not only is there only a single pilot in the helicopter, and not only is he using both hands to hold binoculars, but the helicopter doesn't appear to contain cyclic or collective to begin with. I sometimes go on little digressions when we get to that scene, talking about his presumed customized pedal controls for flight.