Learning to write – German style

With my daughter learning to read and write at primary school in Germany, it is interesting to see which methods are being used.  It often leaves me wondering if I learnt by similar methods, or whether it is a completely different system.

Letters are referred to by their phonetic sounds, so “b” is not “bee” but “buh”, at least for the first two years of primary school, and roughly one of these is covered each week.

I am particularly fascinated by the book that she uses to practise writing the letters in.  It looks almost like a musical stave, except it has less lines.  These correspond to the floors on a pictogram of a house that is at the side of the page.

Apparently, most of the lower-case letters all live downstairs, whilst some of them – and the upper case ones – also go upstairs.  Some letters even venture down into the basement!

I’m pretty sure I didn’t have houses at the end of the lines I was learning to write on…