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Acknowledgments - To a great degree every book owes much to many, but I doubt that few books owe more to children than this one. Thanks go first, therefore, to the children who answered my many questions, took tests and made lists, and all this with a brightness and eagerness which makes "youth eternal." My thanks go also to the parents who have been willing to re-examine the study procedures at home and experiment with, and offer improvement for, the practices set forth in this book to give education a much needed transfusion in the home.

Introduction - This book makes no pretense at solving any educational problems or opening any new windows of insight and vision. It was born out of concern for an insecure, thumb-sucking, erratic-behaviored fifth grader who through complete indifference to learning was making it impossible for his teacher to teach him or the other members of the class. The simple practices used in the home to help the teacher and the child were so rewarding that they have since been adopted by other parents for other grades with equally gratifying results.

01. Little People - The T-shirt with the monogram, the old school colors, and the 19? might still be the gift which father brings junior from the campus co-op on the annual homecoming visit to the old alma mater. Junior might be indoctrinated with the loyal son spirit, but because father and junior have decided that junior must go to the old school is of little consequence unless junior starts to prepare when the T-shirt with the school colors is about size ten. Indeed, it has become critically important that father and junior start very early to plan and to work if junior is to get into the high school course that will most adequately prepare him for college, or into the independent secondary school where he was registered three weeks after he was born.

02. Words - The pedagogic world has tended to make much of the great influence of teachers Zacariah Riney and Mentor Graham upon the life of Abraham Lincoln,, Not to be passed over lightly, however, is the work of his intellectually soul-hungry and ambitious mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, who, though dead before the boy was ten, had stirred his natural desire to learn into an insatiable appetite to know and to understand.

03. Reading - We have seen that words are the tools of thinking and expression. The pattern of words and the ability to see and understand them has been emphasized in the preceding chapter. To separate the study of words and the study of reading is a purely arbitrary division for convenience only, because words are the tools of thinking, and reading is thinking. Having become aware of the tools we are now concerned with the proper use of them.

04. Write - Almost everybody starts out with some interest in penmanship and a desire for a legible handwriting. But somehow there seems to appear a vague notion that handwriting and personality are so closely connected as to be too sacred to touch. "The illegible, sloppy handwriting portrays a complex character, so it is best not to try to change either." Nothing could be further from the truth.

05. Arithmetic - One of the glorious attributes of the young is its ability to improve suddenly and almost mysteriously. The fact remains, however, that good habits of study, a sound foundation for future learning, and a pattern of maturity and responsibility are built with more permanency, and less drudgery in the building, during the years corresponding to the fourth grade through seventh than at any other time in the child's life.

06. Learning - Yes, learning how to learn is the most important of all subjects for it makes success possible in the others and it lasts throughout your whole life. Study and learning are the parts of education which parents and child can understand, see the reasons for, the results of, and the tremendous effort that is required in learning. Study is hard work, irrespective of the doctrine that "learning must be fun for the self-developing child," and it has always been hard work.

07. Learning Tools - The tools of learning are indeed many, but those which will concern your child most aside from you, his parents, are: (1) Time, (2) Books, and (3) Teachers. Indeed, without the proper understanding and use of the tools the whole process of learning is drudgery, characterized by disinterest and delay.

08. Big People - We began this study with the problems which both aptitude and achievement tests present to the elementary school child whose aim is beyond "school until the law lets me quit" or an easy general course providing no college entrance credits. Dealing with fundamentals from the importance of words and the way a's and n's are written to the skills of learning and the reasons for learning, material has been provided for the growth of the mental stature of the child.

Further Reading - Common Sense About Gifted Children, Willard Abraham,
HARPER AND BROTHERS, 1958.

How to Live Through Junior High, Eric W. Johnson,
J. B. LIPPINCOTT CO., 1959.

The Child, the Parent, and the State, James B. Conant,
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS,

Reader's List - Arranged By Grade Level

To offer a reading list for grade groups in elementary school is indeed risky, for the best books and poems belong to all age groups. A little girl of ten reads Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows and writes of the character she likes best: "I like Mr. Badger the best because he is kind and old, and seems to be lonely." A fifteen year old boy writing about the same character says: "Mr. Badger avoided crowds. He enjoyed the quiet of his surroundings, and would not have been caught dead at a football game.

THE END