Learning to read.....again

I have always loved to read, from a very young age I had my face stuck in a book of some kind or another. It was always a great way to escape to some fantasy world and it did wonders for my imagination.

As a parent and having a nice collection of actual, real books in the house, I was very keen to pass on this particular interest to my boys when they reached an appropriate age. Since they were very tiny I have always enjoyed reading them stories at bedtime. Classics like The Tiger Who Came to Tea, The Little Mole Who Thought It Was None Of His Business (Pop Up Edition) and The Gruffalo, have become firm favourites for an early evening read before bedtime.

When BIG started school, at much later age here than in the UK, I was very disappointed that they didn't even broach the subject of reading for the first couple of years so, I took it upon myself to  get BIG reading well in English.  This I did by raiding Amazon for as many Peter & Jane Ladybird books as I could find. It was amazing to relive all of these great books and their amazing illustrations from my childhood with BIG. Thanks to their brilliant design he very quickly got a strong grasp of what he should be doing and would happily sit with me and read a couple of these books each night..

Finally, this year,  the school have started to teach reading in German,  BIG is very good at working out all of the complicated pronunciations and germanic sounding letters and very rarely mixes up his German & English sounds...it's like the roles have almost been reversed...

My spoken German language skills you see, are passable at best but, my German reading skills leave much to be desired! 

When Mrs S. is working and I am home in charge of all things domestic, I'll happily help BIG and SMALL with their homework.. It's every night and they have a little Homework plan so we know what they have to do, the subjects cover Maths, writing practice and of course reading which they now dread because, and i quote...

"Papa is rubbish at German"

Yes, unfortunately, they don't do Peter & Jane books in German, or I couldn't bloody well find any so, I'm basically buggered...

During Reading practice (Wednesday) If there's a word that none of us understands how to pronounce, we can either wait until Mama comes home and dispenses a withering look at Papa for getting it really wrong... or we can listen to the hilarious computer generated voice on my PONS German Dictionary App and try to copy it as best we can.

I say we but, actually mean ME. The boys are obviously very quick to wrap the often complex sounding words around their "zweisprache"(Double Language) tongues leaving Papa struggling to say Fahhrad (Bike) with the right conviction...

I'm basically learning to read again, it's hard and if I'm honest, I much prefer being Papa the story teller, master of suspense and adventures than Papa the idiot who can't even pronounce the German word for Duck.....