Ulli

So J has to have an operation on his toe next week to deal with an ingrown toenail. Although it's a minor procedure, it will require general anesthesia, and he's been fretting about it all day, as my wife informs me. She suggested we try to find a German video on anesthesia and children, so we did. J watched it with rapt attention and it seemed to comfort him. Then K additionally suggested one of the puppets ask him about it. Wow, the floodgates opened: "Ja, ich musste heute zum Arzt. Ich muss nächste Woche eine Operation, der Zehnagel ist ein bisschen zu breit gewachsen und er muss das beschneiden. Er muss die Nagelwurzel töten. Sie müssen mich schlafen lassen."

Ulli told him that he and Sabine and other puppets will come and watch over him while he sleeps.

Kunst 4. Albrecht Dürer 2

This evening I stumbled across the Kunst-Comic series by Mona Horncastle, which features the lives and works of famous artists in graphic novel form. Two are in kindle editio, Albrecht Dürer and Vincent Van Gogh, so I purchased and we got started on the the former: 

I also possess a book with Dürer's complete engravings, etchings, and woodcuts: 

We looked through a lot of this, including my favorite:

World of Warcraft quests as bedtime reading

Tonight we read through a couple of quest chains in German that J did together with my wife earlier in the day in English. 

Turns out the quest descriptions, as well as other game information from various sites (tonight we read about dwarves and shamans, since today he started a dwarf shaman), also make excellent bedtime reading. Since quests are, in effect, stories he has "lived" himself, he has a lot to say about them, and he listens with great attention, investing in his future adventures in the game. Again, pure L2 acquisition gold!

Media update 287

Reading: Erin Hunter, Warrior Cats. In die Wildnis, loc. 614-933/3553 (kindle edition); Walter Moers, Käpt'n Blaubärs Seemansgarn; Christoph Bieber, KiTaBu – Witze, Rätsel, Wissenswertes: Das Kinderbuch gegen langweilige Autofahrten (kindle; selections); Fritz Fischer, 350 Scherzfragen für Schlaufüchse und Knobelkönige (kindle; selections). Listening: Käthe Recheis, König Arthur und die Ritter der Tafelrunde, 5.37-7.20 (end); Ich weiß was, "Die Welt der Zahlen" (59 min.). Gameplay: 1 hour.

Camelot!

The King Arthur audiobook was great right up to the end. J really enjoyed it, making a lot of comments and asked a lot of questions throughout. A few days ago he asked me to pause the listening for a moment while he compared the sorceresses Vivian and Morgana, deciding that Vivian was worse because (in this version) she casts the permanent sleep-spell on Merlin. 

When in the Albert E. audiobook the seven deadly sins came up, J started and asked if they were the "seven deadly virtues" (in English) from Camelot. I tried to explain how in the musical, Mordred turns things on their head and that the virtues (Tugenden) are actually positive qualities. We then went over the seven deadly sins: Hochmut, Habgier, Genusssucht, Maßlosigkeit, Faulheit, Neid, Streitsucht (the last not quite canonically; usually it's Zorn/Wut/Rachsucht). 

Also, J totally understood the significance of this from the Moers book:

"Er bringt Eulen nach Athen, weil Athena ja dort lebt und Eulen sind ihre Haustiere!"

2016
Total audio: 13.36
Total video: 3:11
Total gamplay: 1.30
Age 6.05.27

The Brandenburg Egg

Kunst 3. Marianne von Werefkin and Expressionism

This afternoon we looked at and talked about many paintings from Marianne von Werefkin, one of my favorite expressionist artists, and discussed that school. 

Pure L2 gold: World of Warcraft quests in German

I was just lamenting that World of Warcraft doesn't have language settings other than English, because the quest descriptions are linguistically very rich, but too complex for me to spontaneously translate well. Then it occurred to me that there may be a site on the internet where they are translated in to German. Lo and behold, there is, at 

http://de.wowhead.com/quests 

So I pulled up the ones he is working on and read them. They are very well done: 

In our subsequent chat, J was immediately using the vocabulary from the descriptions. Pure L2 acquisition gold.

Update: for bedtime I re-read and we rehashed the four quests in German we did this morning.  

New bilingualism research 2. Bilinguals and social skills

According to this research, bilinguals develop certain social skills earlier than their monolingual peers. The experiments described here are pretty cool.

Of course, I have no way of knowing how this aspect of my son's personality would have developed had he remained monolingual, but ever since he has been bilingual, he has been highly praised by his teachers for his social skills. 

Wortschöpfungen 8

This morning the word Empörung came up. J then invented the word Emporung, which he defined thusly: "Eine EmPOrung ist wenn sich der Po empört."

When I asked him why a butt gets angry, he replied: "Weil du blöd bist."

Sunday school 20: Joseph 1

Listening: Die Bibel, 2.47-3.19 (Genesis ch. 33-38).

We got to the beginning of the Joseph story, which is one of J's favorites. On the way there, there is some pretty strange material for a six year old: the rape of Dinah and the revenge of Simeon and Levi, Esau's genealogy, and the story of Judah and Tamar. After the Dinah story J commented that he did not like that Simeon and Levi destroyed Shechem's city. I explained the logic of the vengeance, but also told him that Jacob, too, did not agree with what they did. He laughed at the story of Perez and Zerah, that Zerah stuck his hand out of his mother's tummy, then drew it back in again.

An interesting thing happened this morning. Throughout the car ride and grocery shopping, J kept asking me how to say the following words in English:

Israeliten
der israelische Staat
Juden, jüdisch
Hebräer, hebräisch

I also heard him whispering the word Israeliten to himself over and over. When I asked him why, he at first said he didn't want to talk about it. Then, just as we were arriving home, he said he was going to name his "stuffed animal people" the "people of the Israelites" (Ich will mein Stofftiervolk das Volk der Israeliten nennen). 

Very curious! I think this has something to do with the fact that J has always liked to think of his stuffed animals as a community of solidarity transcending the order of nature (the predators and the prey animals are all friends, and all new predator animals have to promise not to do harm to the prey animals). In the bible stories and in my commentaries and explanations, he has understood the people of Israel to be a community of solidarity. 

2016
Total audio: 11.54
Total video: 3:11
Total gamplay: 3.30
Age 6.05.20

Media update 286

In the last couple of weeks we've read all 38 Roger Hargreaves' Mister Men und Misses stories that have been translated into German (a couple are not in this image).

J continues to love and request these stories constantly, especially for bedtime reading. Here's my first post on them discussing some of their many virtues. 

Kunst 2. Styles and schools

Today and a couple of days ago we talked about and looked at various basic styles and schools of art.

Realismus / realistisch
darstellen / darstellend
abbilden
abstrakt
Impressionismus / impressionistisch
Surrealismus / surrealistisch
Stillleben

Star Wars

Explaining Star Wars to Thusnelda.

Here I'm reading Thusnelda the plot summaries of episodes IV and V (all J has seen so far) while J makes further comments and shows her the various characters (most of which we possess from my wife's childhood collection):

Showing Thusnelda how Luke disguised himself on the Death Star:

Showing his Star Wars drawings:

"... bevor mir diese blöde Spinne die Fersen abklaut!!"

J is extremely chatty on weekend mornings, especially when well rested, and especially when he gets to play World of Warcraft. 

Since the game is new and exciting for him, and also highly narrative, it's a great opportunity to get him to talk a lot and to learn new words and concepts. I've been playing with him a good amount, sitting with him while he plays, reading the gamelore on the internet in German for him, and asking him what he has done and would like to do, etc. 

"... bevor mir diese blöde Spinne die Fersen abklaut!!"

This clause, with perfect grammar and syntax, and also highly unusual and creative (i.e., not based on a prepackaged idiomatic expression), burst out of him as he was being attacked. I was highly impressed.

Kunst 1. Horst Antes, Franz Marc, Albrecht Dürer

Today J and I were looking at some of the work of the German artist Horst Antes, specifically his famous "Kopffüßler":

Later, when we were reading Roger Hargreaves's story Mister Sorge, J pointed out that the protagonist was kind of a Kopffüßler.

Before I started this blog, I would often show J the work of notable artists. I printed images of works, then we would glue them into his Kunsthefte, label them, discuss them, and he would do little imitations. Here are his two first Kunsthefte, from 2014-2015:

That's Albrecht Dürer's rabbit there. The artist I emphasized most was Franz Marc, for two reasons: 1) animals!; and 2) colors!

Here are some of J's creations in the Franz Marc style (from March 2014):

I labeled this post Kunst 1 because I'm going to try to be a little more systematic about discussing art with J again and make it into a regular blogpost series. I'll have a next post soon on some of the other artists we worked on in the notebooks.

L2 reading 1

As I've mentioned before, I haven't been pushing L2 reading with J, figuring he has enough on his plate at school. He does some on his own. Today he wanted to read through a mouse book with Ulli and Sabine. I suggested they read a page, which idea J liked very much. His reading was very good. I had the mice read more slowly and make some errors, which he proceeded to correct:

Häusen > Häuser
Dorfen > Dörfer
beschnuppen > beschnuppern