Successful Home Education by Mrs. C. C. Lewis

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Apr 2, 1914

Successful Home Education

By Mrs. C. C. Lewis

MRS. C. C. LEWIS

I FEEL desirous that other mothers should know of the success one mother in Michigan is having in teaching her little boy the elements of reading. She has taken four lessons of the first grade in the Mothers' Normal Department of the Fireside Correspondence School, and writes of her experience as follows:—

"The teacher should give much time to ear training. Teach the child to tell words by hearing the sounds of which they are composed. I find that this method of teaching beginners is far ahead of the old method of learning the letters. When teaching the sounds, I put one sound on the board, 's,' for instance, and after talking to F— about the sound, I go to my work in the kitchen, and he goes with me. Then we think of all the different things in the kitchen with names beginning with that sound.

In this way he becomes very much interested, and often, when nothing is being said about sounds, he tells me of something else he has thought of that begins with a certain sound.

"I never tell him a word which I think he is capable of finding out for himself [a fundamental principle of education], and now he seldom asks me what a word is, but at once begins to separate it into its sounds.

"He is improving quite fast in writing. Often I see him writing words in the air with his finger."

This is genuine success. And how much better for the mother to teach the elements of education to her child in loving association with him about the daily duties of the home than to send him away to school, to receive less rational instruction from a stranger. Hundreds of our mothers ought to be pursuing this course of instruction with their children, and laying for them the foundation of a moral character that will endure throughout eternity. It will cost a little, to be sure; but the price is within reach of the average mother, and the results will be beyond computation.