One of my earliest reading experiences was with the book „Pony, Bear, and Apple Tree”. For me this was a scary, strange looking book. Most notably it was missing a whole lot of words. However, my mother was able to read it just fine, as if all the words were all there. I completely failed to wrap my head around how she did it. I recommend you read the following paragraph out loud:

In a big garden there was a big 🌳. On the tree lived a 🐛.  The 🐛 liked to eat 🍃 and 🍎🍎. One day the 🐛 turned into a beautiful 🦋.

This kind of story. However, in Sigrid Heuck’s children book the drawings were not emoticons that fit in snuggly. Instead, the drawings were big, colourful blobs, outside of the text flow. For me they just did not look part of the story; took me years to figure it out.

An important part of language acquisition is the ability to identify and name things: „Look! A bird!”, „Look! A bird with black feathers!”, „Look! A crow watching another crow cracking a nut!”

Soon we will not only identify the obvious, but start to notice concepts and stories: „It’s not Santa Claus who brings the presents, it’s my parents.” With experience the symbols and discoveries become more and more complex, and by understanding them they turn into inroads leading to highly complex sciences such as Chemistry and Physics.

In sports we also noticed and named a whole lot of things. The 14 parts of a tennis racket are these: the beam, the bumper guard, the butt, the butt cap, the dampeners, the grip, the grommet, the handle, the head, the rim, the rubber collar, the shaft, the strings, and the throat.

Also in Tennis, we have the Serve, the Forehand, the Backhand, the Volley, the Lob and the Slice, and a few more that are all well defined. Given the right trainer this can be taught seriously enough to turn pleasure into nightmare.

In Skateboarding we have the Ollie, the Kick-flip, the Pop-Shuvit, the Heel-Flip, the Manual, and… in this sport every list of tricks is officially incomplete. It’s in the nature of Skateboarding that skaters invent new tricks all the time – and match them to their own style.