In exactly one year, my youngest daughter Alma, who just turned 3, will start school. It scares me to think of her academic life starting at such an early stage (in Denmark you wouldn’t start school before you turn 6), but at the same time I know that she will be at an amazing school with plenty of room to play and explore. Fun things like jumping in puddles, and making roasting food over a bonfire, as Eleanor used to do in her Danish kindergarten, we’ll have to take care of ourselves during family time, but on the other hand, Alma will never be picked up later than 2:45, which is a lot earlier than many Danish children get to go home.
The first two years of school (pre-K & Kindergarten) are mostly play based, and the teaching at our school follows an Imaginative Learning concept, where the children are never told anything is right or wrong. Reading and writing is all based on their own imagination and how the individual child experiences a word and a sentence. This sometimes results in some funny written sentences, since words are being spelled out exactly how the child hears or feels them, and not according to the correct way of spelling. Most younger children don’t realize they’re learning to read, write or do math and the fact that they’re never told if things are right or wrong gives them great confidence.

Even though Alma won’t be doing much schoolwork for the first two years, the school still expects her to be able to do a bit of counting when she first starts. This means we need to do a bit of practicing, and with Alma being so excited about starting school, and Eleanor being so excited about Alma learning new things, it has become Eleanor’s little thing to make sure Alma is learning to count. At the moment they’re reading (or counting) a little counting book called Six with paintings by Katherine Bradford. I don’t know if it’s because of the paintings that are so far from anything you would normally see in a children’s book, or if it’s because the book is not structured from 1-10, but jumps around in the numbers. Anyhow, Alma has almost learned to count, and now counts to two every time she sees the Statue of Liberty, since that’s what you have to do in the book when a picture of a statue shows up on the page.