The first book is a very interesting comparison of children's daily lives in Germany 100 years ago and today.
J found it fascinating. He's starting to ask a lot of questions and make general observations about history. In English he's currently reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prarie with my wife.
For me what is interesting about this book is that the equivalent to the present-day average middle class German family is felt to be a bürgerlich family with a live-in maid and cook, which were in fact quite privileged circumstances in late imperial Germany. The average will have been more like a working-class family. And so in certain ways this book communicates not only a sense of material progress, but also the sense that in certain ways "the German family" had it better 100 years ago.
Ach. The nostalgia of the Bildungsbürgertum.
There are some very cool foldouts:
And also a picture of Kaiser Wilhelm in the classroom, about whom I told J a little:
The bunny story is one of those proto-readers where little images stand in for key words and phrases are repeated over and over.
On the last couple of pages J was able to chime in with a lot of the phrases. The last several weeks of "reading words of the week" are really starting to have an impact.
Viewing: Let's Play Kung Fu Panda, Episode 4 (22:00) and 5 (23:00)
Total audio 2015: 17.42
Total video 2015: 31.52
Age 5.5.24
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