Excerpt from The Normal Course in Reading, Primer: First Steps in Reading The effort of learning to read should do much more for the child than to give him power to recognize words and to pronounce sentences and paragraphs. Many valuable features are found in this book that are new in a book of this grade: (1) The matter which the child is to learn to read relates to his home-life, school, and neighborhood experiences. In these the child's interest is at once supreme and aggressive. (2) The matter to be read is the natural expression of childhood. It is adequate and sequential, though nat ural and simple. These characteristics, together with the quotations used, make the book a natural, easy, and rational beginner's book in literature, whose use will inculcate the ha bit of connected, related thought and expression. This, only, is correct language teaching. (3) The narrative character of the book as an entirety will secure and sustain the interest of the child with out forced efiort or resort to fictitious means, for he is born responsive to his social environment. (4) The lessons are such that by their use the motor activities of the child may be employed, and his self-helpfulness easily secured in preparing for and representing the facts given, and in making applications of what is learned: self-entertainment may be made to result in training for discipline and manual dexterity. The artist and the printer have added much to the pedagogical values of the book. The illustrations, explaining and enlarging the meanings of the text, will prove an invaluable aid to the teacher. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.