CHAPTER XI.

READING.

AFTER children's minds have been opened by objectteaching, and indeed, simultaneously with all the abovedescribed Kindergarten employments and recreations, I begin to teach reading, which also comes legitimately within the Kindergarten culture.

But, as I have hinted before, I consider learning to read English a somewhat unfortunate process for the mind of a child. On account of the irregularity of what is called English orthoepy and orthography, the written language is a chaos into which, when the child's mind is introduced in the usual way, all its natural attempts at classification are baffled. The late Horace Mann, in a lecture on the alphabet, has with great humor and perspicacity shown this; and he recommended that children should be taught to read by words purely. But when some years afterwards his attention was drawn to the phonic method, he accepted it fully; and wrote for Mrs. Mann the preface to her Philadelphia edition of the Primer of Reading and Drawing. This was not until after it had been tested in his own family and some others, where I had introduced the phonic method.

On the details of my method I must enlarge all the more, because I find myself differing in some respects from Mr. Sheldon's plan, which loses a large part of the advantages of the phonic method by not having one definite sound for each letter. As I have taught on my plan successfully for fifteen years, I am prepared to defend it at all points, from the ground of a various experience. But I can adduce also

the highest philologic authority for my mode of sounding the alphabet,* as well as an argument of common sense from the nature of the case.

The primal cause of the chaotic condition of English orthography, is the fact that the Roman alphabet, which was a perfect phonography of the old Latin language, lacked characters for four English vowels and four English consonants. The Latin monks had not the wit to invent new characters for these additional sounds; but undertook to use the Roman letters for them also. Hence for the vowel heard in the words irk, err, work, and urge, they used indifferently all four characters; for truly one would do as well as another. But if they had put a dot into the middle of the o, and added it to the alphabet, it would have been better than either. Also, if for the vowel sound of pun, they had put a dot under the u; and for the vowel sound of man, they had put a dot under the a; and for the vowel sound of not, a dot under the o; they would have had four more letters in their alphabet, which would have completed the phonography of the English vowels. Similar dots under d t s c would have made a phonography of consonants, and avoided the awkward combinations of sh, ch, and the ambiguity of th, which now stands for the differing initials of then and thin.

But as they did not do this, a certain divorce took place between the ideas of the sounds and the letters; and hence the long uncertainty of the English orthography, and the stereotyped absurdities which now mark it.

It is so nearly impossible to remedy a difficulty which has passed into print so largely, that we have to accept the evil, and remedy as best we may the disadvantage it is to young minds to have all this confusion presented to them on the threshold of their literary education.†

*See the North American Review of January and April — articles Kraitsir's Significance of the Alphabet, from the pen of an eminent philologist; also Kraitsir's Nature of Language and Language of Nature, published in 1851, by George P. Putnam in New York.

†The only possible advantage the present spelling has, is the help it

It was suggested to me by Dr. Kraitsir, that I should take a volume of any book, and count the times that each of the vowels, and c and g, were sounded as the Romans sounded them, and how many times they were sounded otherwise, and thus see whether it was true, as he said, that these Roman sounds were the most frequent, even in the English language. I did so on a few pages of Sir Walter Scott's novels, and found that the letter i sounded as in ink 240 times, to one that it sounded as in bind; and though the proportion was not quite so great with any other vowel, yet there was a large majority for the Roman sound, in each instance, as well as for the hard sounds of c and g. Indeed I found g was hard, even before e and i, in the case of every Saxon word; and that all the soft gs, which are not many, were derived from the Norman-French.

I then set myself to find what words in English were written entirely with the Roman-sounding letters; and, to my surprise, found a large number, enough to fill a primary spelling-book ;- while most of the syllables of the rest of the words in the language yielded on analysis the same sounds. It immediately occurred to me to begin to teach children to read by these words, whose analysis would always yield them the Roman sounds, and reserve, till afterwards, the words which are exceptions, leaving the anomalies to be learnt by rote.

I tried my first experiment on a child a little more than four years old, by printing on a black-board certain words, letter by letter, until he had learned the whole alphabet, both to know each character at sight, and to print it on the black-board, and it was a signal success.

For the convenience of those who do not know the old Roman pronunciation of Latin, for which our alphabet is a perfect phonography, I will give the sounds of the letters here.

gives to Etymologists, but it also often confuses them. A perfect alphabet, that is, an alphabet with eight more characters than the Roman, would have been the right thing to have had in the right place and time.

In the case of the vowels (voice letters),

in the case of the consonants, giving the power of the letter by making them finals, and obscuring the e as much as possible for the lip letters, ĕb, ĕf, ĕp, ěv, while the semi-vowels m, n, 1, r, require not even the obscure ĕ to their being sounded perfectly, shutting the lips and sounding m, opening them and shutting the palate to sound n, holding the tongue still to sound 1, shaking it to sound r, (ěl, ěm, ĕn, ĕr;) the tooth letters ĕd, ět, ĕss, ězz—and the throat letters ěc, ěk, eq,* eg, and a breathing from the throat for h. Often children will come to the Kindergarten knowing the letters, in which case it is best to begin with the letters according to the organs, as is suggested in my first chapter, and when they give the old names you can say, "No, I do not want that name but the sound."

The whole alphabet in order will then be ǎh, ĕb, ěc, ĕd, ěh, ef, eg, h (breathed), ih, ěj, ěk, ěl, ěm, ěn, oh, ĕp, ĕq, ĕr, ĕss, ět, ŭh (oo) ěv, w (breathed) ĕx, y, just like ih, and not called wye, ěz. Also the sign & for the word and.

In the first chapter of this book, I have detailed one method of beginning with a class, that of giving the sounds of the letters first, classed according to the organs.

But my common way is to begin with whole words, which are more sure to interest a child. A limited number of

*k, q, and y were not Roman letters but Greek ones, k being introduced into the Latin originally as an abbreviation of ca and q as an abbreviation of cu. J and x were introduced into our alphabet by the first printers, but we have appropriated j to a new sound, not in the Latin language; and we have two sounds for x, (as printed Latin has), one being gs and the other cs. The Latins at first wrote lex legs, and vox vocs, as we see by the variations of these nouns for case.

words arranged in sentences, teaches them to know and write the whole alphabet. For the convenience of teachers who may not have either my "First Nursery Reading-Book," or Mrs. Mann's "Primer of Reading and Drawing" on hand, I will give here some sentences that contain the whole alphabet, which the teacher can teach by printing them on the black-board, and letting the children imitate them with pencil on the slate, or chalk on the black-board.

O puss, puss, pussy; O kitty, kitty, kitty; Kitty sings miu, miu; pussy sings mieaou; pussy is old, pussy is cold; put pussy into mamma's basket; mamma is singing to papa; papa is kissing mamma; pussy, go to kitty, go, go, go; kitty is in mamma's basket; go into mamma's garden, and pick roses, anemones, tulips, and pinks; mamma's velvet dress fits well; bells ring and cars go; cars go very quickly; hens sit; hens eggs; eggs in lark's nest; eggs in linnet's nest; larks sing tralala, tralala; fill mamma's basket full of roses, anemones, pinks, tulips, crocuses; Lizzy is dizzy, very dizzy; Helen is rosy red; Alexis sent his mamma a jar full of jelly; Barbara kisses Cora; Dora is spinning yarn; Flora is spinning yarn ; Gilbert sent Henry a jar of guava jelly; Isabella is kissing Julia; Karlito sent a linnet's egg to Lilian; Margaret picks roses; Nina picks tulips in Olivia's garden; Penelope plants pinks in Ellen's garden; Rosalind sings to Quasi-modo; Susan puts eggs into mamma's basket; Tina brings roses to Vivian; Willy brings crocuses to mamma.

The above sentences, written over and over again, will teach all the letters; others must be added, but after certain letters are learnt, it is useful, and a pleasant variety, for the children to write columns of words, with only one letter differing; thus, old, cold, fold, gold, hold, sold, told, wold; ell, bell, dell, fell, hell, quell, sell, tell, well; art, cart, dart, hart, mart, part, tart, start; in, binn, din, fin, jin, kin, pin, sin, tin, win, &c., &c.

My "First Nursery Reading-Book" is entirely made up of such columns, after half a dozen pages of words in sentences;