Excerpt from The Nursery Lesson Book: A Guide for Mothers in Teaching Young Children

Dolphus trollope in his Memoirs, speaks Of the manner in which he learned to read. Before being taught that the letters of the alphabet were placed in an artificial order, he began with small words; his mother had a number of cards, each one having printed on it a letter Of the alphabet. She would shake the cards up, and throw them on the floor, telling the children that the first one who brought her C A T would receive a penny or some other little prize. The children tumbled over each other in their eagerness to find the letters which made up Cat. In this way Adolphus and his brothers and Sisters learned to make out more than a hundred words of one or two syllables in common use among children before they could recite half the alphabet. That bugbear Of most children, the memorizing of the alphabet, was eliminated from their education. In the same way the Trollope children were taught numbers, and a species of simple object lessons was adopted with them long before F roebel's theories became known even in Germany.

N o Text-book can supply the place Of intelligence in teaching small children; but it may prove a material help, and save the mother much routine labor in suggesting the different material for lessons, step by step. This is what this book aims to do. It is not a school-book in the ordinary sense. It has been prepared to fill the admitted want, among mothers, of a single volume, which shall serve as a guide and helper in teaching children too young to go to school. The play idea illustrated so admirably in the Trollope nursery has been adopted wherever possible. Its methods are those which have been approved by modern experience and intelligence as the simplest and the best in the instruction Of the very young. The aim has been to enlist the attention Of the child by awaking interest in what is taught. The brevity Of the lessons, as well as the variety embraced in each one, should prevent weariness on the part of the child. The material needed in nursery teaching is to be found in almost every nursery or in any house. There is scarcely a home which has not picture-books, and the manufacture of much of the material suggested in Kindergarten courses is simple. For instance, any one can prepare a set of alphabet cards by cutting out of a newspaper the large letters used in the advertisements and pasting them upon cards; beans, marbles, pebbles, bits of wood, burned matches, waste blocks from a carpenter's shop.

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