If you allow them to sleep in your bed they will spread until they occupy the available space completely.
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Our son Florian is a first grader (started with school just four weeks ago, interesting times ahead!) and we've now been introduced to the way he's supposed to learn reading - by writing.
What sounded silly (at least to me) actually seems to work quite well. He has this big poster hanging at the door of his room with the alphabet and a picture of something that starts with the corresponding letter. If he wants to write a word (and strangely he wants to do that very often), you can see him collect the sounds that make up the word letter by letter. He doesn't need the poster too often anymore.
Of course what he writes is not correct, and I bet it is harder to do right in German with our many Diphthong sounds like "au" that sounds like the "ou" in our or "ie" which is just a long version of "i". But he's getting pretty close and improving fast. Funnily he can currently write better than he can read, sometimes he has a really hard time to read what he's just written.
I wonder how this inversion that seems to be there could be used in different areas as well. Seems that some of the agile development processes follow a similar pattern.
- You don't start with the big picture (the whole word), you assemble your application requirement by requirement (you write the word letter by letter).
- You assert the correctness of those small steps with unit tests (compare the sound of the letter with a known sound).
- Sometimes the application works even though you still don't grok the problem domain (you write better than you read).
- The result may not be correct at the first time, but you have acceptance tests (your parents and teachers?) that steer you into the right direction.
So all my son is does is eXtreme Writing. Interesting.
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