Triggered primarily by the results of the PISA study, we are talking today, more than ever, of an educational crisis and early childhood support.

Imagine you are sitting in the cinema. The film is in a language that you do not understand. On top of that, only different colored spots flit across the canvas, of which you have not the slightest idea what they are supposed to mean. And you're in something like a newborn baby who has no idea what's going on. Your advantage over the toddler is still that you at least know what a “cinema”, a “film”, a “language”, a “screen” and “spots” are, while the child does not has available. It has hardly had any experience with all the things that surround it. But how does the child have these experiences and learn all these “terms” with the help of which they can gradually untangle, distinguish and mean this optical confusion?

The word “concept” already says it all. The child “understands by understanding”. It takes things in hand, puts them in their mouth, presses them, pulls on them and looks at what they can take, smells them, listens to their noises and sometimes tosses them around. This is how it learns to differentiate between things. They all have different shapes, properties, surfaces, temperatures ...

Visual perception gradually develops from all these tactile experiences. For example, the child has had so many gripping experiences with a cup that it recognizes it without necessarily having to touch it. Visual perception is thus on a more abstract level than tactile and gains more and more the upper hand with age.

On the first double page of my book with the title “My First Things” you can see a spoon and a cup.

The step from three-dimensional reality to two-dimensional image must be learned. Creating and recognizing an image is not a natural, but a cultural process.

In order to make this important step from reality to image easier for the children, I have tried to keep this enormous step as small as possible in my work by drawing the things and situations depicted as realistically and in as much detail as possible.

If you are interested in this topic, I can recommend my Facebook page (and Instagram), where the topic of children's perception is vividly dealt with in small bites.