THE FIRST ENGLISH READING BOOK; BEING A SERIES OF LESSONS ON HOME, SCHOOL, AND THINGS OUT OF DOORS. BY THOMAS CRAMPTON, Master of the Brentford Public School; AND THOMAS TURNER, Master of the Redcross Street School, Bristol. Entered at Stationers' Hall. LONDON: GROOMBRIDGE & SONS, PATERNOSTER ROW. PREFACE. THE Authors submit this little Reading Book to their fellow-teachers as intended to supply the generally expressed want of simple and progressive Reading Lessons. Young children need much help in this way, for many early lessons are either repulsive collections of mere monosyllables, strung together without sense or connection; while, on the other hand, those that aim at supplying materials for thought, as well as for reading, are too often formed regardless of difficulties in words, style, and arrangement. While there is a redundancy of books, there seems to be a paucity of good and original easy lessons. In preparing the following pages, the Authors have avoided making up a book of worn-out materials. Seeing but little extant in the shape of reading lessons of easy words and suitable in style, which they could honestly use, they have spared neither time nor trouble in writing these lessons; which are based on OBSERVATION,-the first faculty to which appeal should be made in young children,-and tend to induce a love for the simple, beautiful, good, and true. In teaching young children to read, a rigid uniformity of subject is unadvisable, although such connected lessons are most proper when the chief difficulties of reading have been conquered. A sufficient variety, it is hoped, will here be found to sustain attention: while the mind will be led to see that natural connection of objects which after lessons should develop. In thus attempting to show how homely things. should be treated as reading lessons, the Authors have adopted a style suitable for children. This, by no means easy task, has been most fully carried out in the earliest lessons. Difficulties of language, however, in the subsequent lessons are but very gradually introduced. iii It is hoped that the colloquial style in which some lessons are written, will aid in banishing the wearisome monotone so characteristic of many schoolboys' reading. To help children to read as they would speak, we have given them to read what they would say. The arrangement of words for spelling exercises in columns has been generally discarded. But some selection is advisable; as children who are expected to learn all the words of a reading lesson, will be discouraged from learning any. By requiring too much we get nothing. The Authors have therefore used italics to indicate a few words for spelling in each lesson. These words are also so selected as to prepare for early lessons in Grammar. In some lessons the nouns only are marked; in others, the verbs ; in others, the adjectives; and so on. In most cases the same word is marked but once for spelling, and words belonging to any class only by virtue of their special use, are |