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Apr 16, 1493
Horn Book
Hornbook was for centuries a child’s first introduction to reading. Hornbooks were imported into the colonies early in the American experience.Really not a book at all, the hornbook usually consisted of a single sheet of paper containing the alphabet in upper and lower case letters, a shortened syllabary, the invocation, and the Lord’s
Prayer. It was therefore the child’s first introduction to christianity. -
Primers
The mainstay of colonial primary education was the primer. This book was called a primer (a word that originally meant a book of prayers) because it was thought to contain the primary essentials for one’s spiritual existence. Unlike the hornbook and battledore, the primer was a true book (some were more than 70 pages) and a comprehensive text. Primers imported into the colonies are documented as early as 1655 in New England. -
Spelling
They were introduced to the colonies by the English. -
Spellers
Spelling books, known colloquially as “spellers,” were in use in England by the late 1500s but were first introduced into the colonies in quantity at the turn of the 18th century. They were therefore relative newcomers to the field of education when compared to the time-honored status of hornbooks and primers. -
Battledore
By about the middle of the 18th century, the hornbook had evolved into a version known as a “battledore,” which was sold alongside the traditional hornbook. Made of cardboard folded into three, the battledore reveals a distinct shift toward the secular.
(A Ape, B Bucket, C Cannon) should be compared with those -
Webster's American Spelling Book
Webster’s American Spelling Book was the undisputed best seller of introductory reading textbooks in the United States. -
The English Reader
The most widely used of these readers in the young United States was titled the English Reader. It was written by Lindley Murray, an American-born Quaker who had gone into exile in York, England, after his merchant New York family were branded as loyalists after the Revolutionary War. Murray’s English Reader, first published in the United States in 1799, contained not a single work, prose or poetry, by an American.
Abraham Lincoln called it "the best schoolbook . -
American Dictionary of English Language
In 1829, a year after he had published his
famous dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language, Webster completely revised his speller. -
Cobb's Juvenile Reader No. 3
The reader includes factual materials, such as
short accounts of chocolate, opium, printing
and the porcupine. -
Cobb's Juvenile Reader No. 2
Cobb’s Juvenile Reader series, written by the schoolmaster Lyman Cobb of New York state, also expected the child to finish the speller before beginning the readers. Cobb’s stories
have titles like “The Good Children,” “The Diligent Scholar,” and “The Pet Lamb.” -
The Eclectic Reader
The second reader of 1837 is one of the earliest to include comprehension questions. In “Praise
to God,” (p. 25), the questions after the selection ask for more than factual answers. In this early edition, words in the stories (syllabified by hyphens) are presented after the reading selection. -
Cobb's Juvenilr reader No. 1
The difference between the Cobb readers of 1832 and 1844 is instructive. The second reader of the old series had a succession of stories, but no teaching apparatus, such as questions. In contrast, the first New Juvenile Reader has
lists of the words to be found in the following story (to be decoded by using the alphabet/spelling method), their definitions, and some factual questions. -
The Village Reader
The stories of The Village Reader are deeply moralistic or informational. A selection titled “The Blind Boy” clearly expects children to be able to understand similes and metaphors: -
David Tower's The Gradual Speller
The Spelling Book was formerly the only text-book used in teaching a child to read. Its place, in that respect, is now supplied by Primers and Reading Books, expressly adapted to that end, and better suited to the purpose. The Spelling Book now falls into its appropriate sphere of giving the learner the orthography and orthoepy [pronunciation] of the language. -
McGuffey's Newly Revised Eclectic Spelling Book
By 1846 Smith had taken over from the original firm of Truman & Smith.
McGuffey’s name is used in the title, but he is not credited as the author. The adoption of Webster’s spelling changes by this important series was crucial to their wide public acceptance. -
Cobb's Spelling Book
It is a standard for pronouncing the English Language. -
The School Reader
Written by Charles Sanders, the transformation in readers is evident from the questions included by Sanders after his selections. His series included material of interest to children,
but it still presupposed that they had gone through the spelling book -
McGuffey's Newly Revised Eclectic Fourth Reader
The reading exercises are selected from the best compositions of the model writers in our language, The fourth
reader includes rules on elocution (a reminder of the continuing oral nature of reading instruction), words to be spelled and defined, and comprehension questions. -
Sarah Griffin, Introduction to the Southern Second Class Reader
Familiar tales for children. Griffin was author of the Southern Class Readers. The series of readers was unusual in that it was designed expressly for the southern market and written by a woman, at a time when the authorship of textbooks was overwhelmingly a male stronghold. (Mr. M.M. Mason, principal of an academy, served as her coauthor for the first reader.) -
Hillard's The Third Primary Reader
In Hillard’s third reader, the selections deal with children’s adventures. The poem “Casablanca”—“The boy stood on the burning deck, /Whence all but him had fled”—was a great favorite for declamation on evenings when parents were invited to the school to see their children perform. -
Regents of the Desert University. The Deseret Second Book
The Mormons wanted to make it simpler for children to learn to read and spell; they wished to address the needs of converts converging on Salt Lake City from many different countries;
and Brigham Young, the Mormon leader, was reportedly a terrible speller. -
TheMetropolition Fourth Reader
By the 1870s, a large Catholic school system was in competition in many cities with the public school system, attracting the children of Catholic parents. Readers designed for this audience differed in content, but not methodology, from the mainstream texts. They were usually authored anonymously, with only a reference to the author’s particular order -
Monroe's The Chart-Primer, or First Steps in Reading
Monroe was the author of a major series of readers in the last quarter of the 19th century. In his phonic approach, what he calls “Build up the Word” we would call “sounding out." -
Sinton's Word Primerw
Swinton’s Word Primer is a case in point. The first month of the school year was to be spent in learning at sight useful words such as parts of the head or kinds of fruit, but in the second month children were asked to pronounce and spell words on the basis of their phonic similarity. This “word primer” is really the old spelling book in a new dress. -
Rebecca Pollard, Pollard's Synthetic Speller
Rebecca Pollard initially published her Synthetic series herself, but it was soon taken up by a commercial publisher. She taught all the sounds of the letters before moving children into text. Her pronunciation chart associated letters
with sounds that had no relation to a word: the pronunciation of ch/tch is inspired by a picture of a train (“ch, ch, ch”). -
Edward Ward's The Rational Method in Reading. Second Reader
Nursery stories begin to appear in this reader, along with speaking animals: the tale of “Little Silver-Hair” and the three bears is still recognizable -
Ellen Cyr's The Children's First reader
Ellen Cyr also used a synthetic phonics approach, marking the new words diacritically before each story. She was the first woman to have a major series marketed under her own name: the Children’s Readers were soon retitled the Cyr Readers. -
Edward Ward's The Rational Method in Reading. First Reader.
Nursery stories begin to appear in this reader, along with speaking animals: the tale of “Little Silver-Hair” and the three bears is still recognizable -
Edward Ward's The Rational Method in Reading
Ward describes his approach in this teacher’s manual. It is an early example of a new genre: teacher’s manuals printed separately from the readers. -
The Arnold Primer
Arnold demonstrates the sentence approach. A picture (a red apple) ispresented to the class for discussion, and is then followed by a printed statementon the blackboard: “This is a red apple.” Sentences are then examinedby words (apple, see), which in turn are examined by letters (a, s) -
Wheeler's Graded Readers
This sentence-method reader states that“This little book... is to be read by thechildren and not to them by the teacher. A child does not learning to speak a word by hearing it once. -
Edward Ward's The Rational Method in Reading, Additional Primer
Apparently the primer alone proved inadequate, because Ward later published this additional primer. -
Plan of Work for the Progressive Road to rRading
Burchill, Ettinger and, Dubs developed The Progressive Road series invoked the progressive educational movement inits title while using the “classics of childhood” as its texts. The first reader has nursery stories with repetitive refrains such as “Then I will make it myself, saidthe Hen.” At first glance the reader appears to be, methodologically, a perfectexample of the story method. -
Edwaed Ward's The Rational Method in Reading. Additional Second Reader, By Mary Ward
An additional second reader published 17 years later incorporated the nurserystories, fables, and fairy tales that were becoming very popular in the first two decades of the 20th century. -
Behaviorism
Ivan Pavlov worked with dogs, stimulus of bell signifies food. Positive rewards systems in schools for doing expected work. Giving stickers. -
Syntactic Structures
Chomsky provided a basis for a nativist view about language acquisition, a view that holds that humans come to the world "wired" to acquire the language of the community they were born into. -
Linguistics and Reading
Charles Fries wrote a book called Linguistics and Reading. In it he outlined what he thought the teaching of reading would look like if it were viewed from the perspective of linguistics. It tells the reader that somethings do not need to be taught explicitaly because oral language takes care of them more or less automatically. -
Theory of Syntax
Written by Chromsky. Children will acquire the language they were born into. -
Kenneth Goodman 1965-
The inner workings of the child and how they make sense of how they read we shouldn't critize their mistakes. Continued what Brown did. -
Reading: A Psycholinguistic Guessing Game
Goodman laid out the elements of language that he thought readers employed as they constructed meaning for text they encountered. Readers could reduce their uncertainty about unknown words or meanings. Making word identification and comprehension process more manageable. -
Chall's 8 Principles of Reading
Goals for reading should include comprehension, interpretation and application of reading along with word recognition. -
Understanding Reading
Smith argued that reading was not something you were taught, but rather something you learned to do. Teachers didn't teach reading they helped children read. -
Frank Smith wrote Understanding Reading
Resding was not something that was taught but something one learned. He believed there was no special prerequisites to learning to read. Reading was making sense of one type of information. -
Intregrated Instruction
Reading can be intregrated into other subjects across curriculum. -
Put Reading First
National Instruction for Literacy completed a study and identified five reading strategies. phonetics, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension and fluency. -
Engagement Theory, Guthrie and Wigfield
Engaged readers are better readers. If they are engaged they are more motivated to read. -
Common Core Standards
The standards were developed to Build on the excellent foundation of standards states have laid, the Common Core State Standards are the first step in providing kids with a high-quality education. -
NCLB No Child Left Behind
President Bush believed all children should recieve a fair education.