Cecile Loupan and my Bathroom Project

Last summer, a friend of our family gave me an interesting book "Croire en Son Enfant" by Cecile Loupan . I read it with much interest, since this is a book written by quite an outstanding Mother about the way she was bringing up her children. It is basically a book about early education, about how to teach your baby to read at the age of 1, how to teach your baby to count at the age of 1, and many more things. Being a firm believer in the importance of oral culture in young children, those ideas did not impress me much. What did impress me a lot, though, was how to teach your baby all sorts of other things - encyclopedic knowledge, as Cecile Loupan puts it. All of a sudden I realized that there was one area which I didn't teach my elder daughter Camilla at all: FINE ARTS! Music - yes, literature - yes, fine arts - no! Well, I did take her to the museums but it wasn't too often. She didn't know any painters or sculptors. The only sculpture she knew was Michelangelo's David. I decided it had to be changed. 

This happened about the same time as I was trying to teach Camilla to read. The problem is, being bilingual, she had to learn to read both in English and in Russian, and the principles of reading in these two languages are completely different. Besides, Camilla showed no interest in learning to read. 

Inspired by Cecile Loupan's book, I started a project which now everybody in our family likes, and which made Camilla WANT to read in even 3 languages! I decided that there is one spot in the apartment where a person's mind and eyes are not occupied while the body is busy doing important things: the bathroom. So I made a carton board with holes for inserting paper sheets of different sizes and hung it on the bathroom door - not too high, just in front of a person's face. I put up the reproduction of some piece of art (thanks to the Internet and color printer!), some description of that piece of art or its author, and a Latin proverb with a Russian translation. The result was inevitable and fantastic. We all are learning Latin proverbs, enjoy and learn about art and Camilla is learning quickly how to read in these three languages!