-letters. The latter were sounded the Italian way,
as in the words _a_rm, _e_gg, _i_nk, _o_ak, and Per_u_. This teacher had
Miss Peabody's "First Nursery Reading-Book," and when she had taught the
class to make all the words on the first page of it, she gave each of
the children the book and told them to find first one word and then
another. It was a great pleasure to them to be told that now they could
read. They were encouraged to copy the words out of the book upon their
slates.

The "First Nursery Reading-Book" has in it _no_ words that have
exceptions in their spelling to the sounds given to the children as
the powers of the letters. Nor has it any diphthong or combinations of
letters, such as oi, ou, ch, sh, th. After they could read it at sight,
they were told that all words were not so regular, and their attention
was called to the initial sounds of thin, shin, and chin, and to the
proper diphthongs, ou, oi, and au, and they wrote words considering
these as additional characters. Then "Mother Goose" was put into their
hands, and they were made to read by rote the songs they already knew
by heart, and to copy them. It was a great entertainment to find the
_queer_ words, and these were made the nucleus of groups of similar
words which were written on the blackboard and copied on their slates.

We have thought it worth while to give in detail this method of teaching
to read, because it is the most entertaining to children to be taught
so, and because many successful instances of the pursual of this plan
have come under our observation; and one advantage of it has been,
that the children so taught, though never going through the common
spelling-lessons, have uniformly exhibited a rare exactness in
orthography.

In going through this process, the children learn to print very nicely,
and generally can do so sooner than they can read. It is a small matter
afterwards to teach them to turn the print into script. They should be
taught to write with the lead pencil before the pen, whose use need not
come into the Kindergarten.

But we must not omit one of the most important exercises for children
in the Kindergarten,--that of block-building. Froebel has four Gifts of
blocks. Ronge's "Kindergarten Guide" has pages of royal octavo filled
with engraved forms that can be made by variously laying eight little
cubes and sixteen little planes two inches long, one inch broad, and
one-half an inch thick. Chairs, tables, stables