Top priority

Besides playing we also do some formal learning. What we as parents find important now, besides the obedience thing, which we still work on and still achieve results with (oh! our sweet littluns), is reading. So I did some investigation and bought the book:  How to teach your baby to read by Glen and Janet Doman.



And today we started! The previous days I made a shoebox with flashcards with words. Today I showed them to the kids, who were curious to know what is more in the box. Boas already requested for some words that are special to him now (animals!!), which I gladly added.

The idea of this book is that children can, want and should learn to read early. It seems that if we increase the size of the letters, also small children (even babies, but unfortunately we don't have them yet ;-) ) can learn to recognise words. And even much faster than older children or grown ups. And since they probably will really benefit from learning to read early (because a whole new world of information and fun opens up and kids who are familiar with reading from a young age seem to have less language problems when they're older), we think it's definitely worth the try!

So that is our first real method, if you want :-)

I also try to regularly expose them to the English language. I bought and borrowed some nice English picture books. And we discovered 'Engels met Raaf' on Schooltv.nl

 We don't use the materials that go with the films yet, but I try to let them watch an episode weekly.  And if they watch a familiar film, like Dora the Explorer, we sometimes pick the English language.

Why would we like our children to know English soon? We have several reasons for that.

1. a second language can be learnt faster and easier at a young age, specifically before the age of 6.

2. once our children can understand English, a huge lot of other information will be available to them.

3. we are quite internationally oriented and feel God won't keep us here forever, so we also try to prepare our children for that.

Learning is so much fun!! Every time is discover something new I get excited about teaching our children. But, it's good to know your priorities. And if you don't know, talk to your sweet hubbie :-).