Essentials of Arithmetic: Primary Book (Classic Reprint)

This book is the first of a series of three intended to cover the essentials of arithmetic in the eight school years of the elementary course. It consists of five chapters, the first of which reviews the work usually done in the first and second grades, the others covering the work of the successive half grades through the fourth school year. If it is introduced in Grade II, the pupils should complete Chapter I in that year; but if it is first placed in the hands of the class in Grade III, it will suflR ce to take a rapid review of Chapter I, omitting such portions as may already be perfectly familiar to the children. A textbook for these grades can be constructed on any one of several definite plans, or, indeed, with little attention to any systematic arrangement whatever. It may consist of a series of devices for teachers, such as games and dramatizations, all valuable in themselves but not offering the material needed in a usable textbook. To be usable a book should suggest devices of this kind, which with many others the teachers may bring into their work, but it fails of its purpose if it uses most of its limited space in this manner. The primary purpose of a textbook in arithmetic is to furnish a large amount of material which the teachers would otherwise have to dictate, and to arrange this material in a systematic order. Teachers need hundreds of examples in addition, hundreds of examples in subtraction, and so on, and they should not be required to make up, arrange, and dictate this material. Teachers always welcome suggestions of games, of dramatizations of number relations, and of means to apply number facts to the daily experiences of the child, but such devices of teaching must necessarily come in large part from the teachers themselves.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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