Excerpt from A New Elementary Arithmetic: Uniting Oral and Written Exercises

Fon several years past there has been an increasing demand for a two-book series of Arithmetics, and various attempts to meet this demand have been made, but so far unsuccessfully.

The most common device has been the selection of two books from a series composed of three or more books, and the presen tatien of the treatises, thus selected, as a complete two-book series. In several instances a thin little primary, with simple lessons for the first two or three years of school instruction, has been united with an advanced treatise, nearly every page of which presents matter too difficult for children under twelve years of age. In other instances the primary lessons have been wholly discarded, and the second and a higher book have been made a two-book series.

Both of these expedients have proved unsatisfactory, for the obvious reason that the first book either ends too low or begins too high. The use of a thin primary as a first book brings the pupils to the second or higher book before they have the capac ity or the training requisite to master such a treatise, and the use of a second book for a first begins the course at too high a point, and makes necessary several years of oral instruction, much of which is poor, or is given with unnecessary labor on the part of both teachers and pupils. The lessons in number, adapted to the first two years of school life, can best be given orally, but exclusive oral instruction in the third, fourth, and fifth years involves an amount of blackboard and slate work which is a severe tax on the eyes and nerves of little children.

The Elementary Arithmetic aims to avoid both of these errors. It covers the ground of the first two books of the author's three-book series, but does not present the first lessons so fully. It takes it for granted that pupils who have been in school two or three years do not need to spend months in learning to count, read, and write numbers from 1 to 100.

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.