I'm not sure whether it's luck, timing or some kind of impressive stress response, but sometime during our moving-stravaganza, L has clicked on the concept of phonics, and now he's trying to read everything. Street signs, the yogurt container, graffiti on the train - suddenly they're really interesting, and we need to talk about what they say Right Now.
He loves to have us read to him, and had gotten really good (back when we lived in the Old Country) at lying in bed looking at books in the morning, but had always insisted that he did not want to learn how to read himself. "It's too hard" and "You can read to me!" were the most common reasons, but I think mostly it was just that he didn't get it - this shape makes a sound? Except in English, where it makes a different sound?
He's also trying really hard to make English "th" and "r" sounds, which he hadn't gotten a lot of practice doing in German, and he's trying hard to disentangle prepositions (he was using an all-purpose "where", pronounced "whirr", to mean "that", "which", "who" and "where"), so it's language development central over here. I have this nagging feeling the English development is coming at the expense of German, since we really haven't been using it since we left, and I feel guilty about that. He learned so much! Curse you, ridiculously high tuition at the bilingual private school!
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