Excerpt from First Steps in English The work in language in the earlier years is done in a somewhat broad and diversified field. It begins in the lowest primary grades with the little finger-plays and play-stories; it comprehends the stories told to the children, and their reproduction of these stories; it tactfully corrects the errors that are bred in out-of-school associations, and inculcates the habits of grammatical speech; it makes a beginning within simple lines of the written work that, later, grows into the more formal compositions; and it plants the seed - scarcely more than that - that shall ripen in the child's mind under later direction into a knowledge of the grammar of the English language. The teacher's fitness for the work of making language a Land Beautiful and Charming must arise largely from her being endowed with the graces of tact, sympathy, and patience - that patience that plants, waters, and then hopefully trusts and expects each seed to spring up, become a stalk, and bear the rich wheat-head. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.