Educating Peter

Peter has adjusted to being in school, and has the whole homework thing pretty much down. While he does all right with the reading, it's far from his favorite subject, probably because he actually has to learn something to do it. The teacher (Mrs. Peters) used a phonetic learning program to introduce the kids to reading letter by letter. In fact, if you ask Peter to spell something, he doesn't say the letter names (ay, bee, cee, dee...) but instead just the letter sound (ah, beh, keh, deh...). In this way he seems to be able to read just about any word he comes across, given enough time (German words can be rather long...)

Since German reading isn't his favorite subject, you can imagine how he feels about English reading. But I want to make sure discovers English reading, and not wait until the 3rd grade when they'll start in the school here. After all, while I don't have an plans to move (the last transatlantic move cured me of any wanderlust), who knows where we'll be in 3 years?

I hit upon an idea a few weeks ago - shameless appealing to his mercenary nature. For every page he read outside of homework, a star. Three stars for every English page. The stars could be redeemed for small prizes. The prize list so far is:

• 10 stars: 10 minutes of me reading aloud to him, with no co-reading required on his part
• 50 stars: on ice cream cone at the ice cream shop of his choice
• 250 stars: a trip to the zoo.

I have to admit is did not have the effect I desired: Peter still showed no interest in books.

Peter's teacher was out sick this (short) school week, so there was no homework. I announced Monday afternoon a one-day bonus program: 5 stars per page of English. Now, Peter can do the math, and quickly realized that 10 pages would earn him an ice cream cone. Quicker than you can imagine, the boy had devoured 10 pages in his 'Dinosaur Day' book, and I had to start calcutating what a trip to the Krefeld Zoo was going to run me.

But luckily he couldn't hold on to them. Asterix the Gaul books beckoned, and he quickly spent 10 stars. Now his goal is 100 stars, at which point he wants to invite his little sister for ice cream. Now we're working on the slight differences in the letters - his first instinct is to read 'very' as 'fery' and 'cow' as 'cov'.

Time to start him on the Electric Company!