In the ‘Standards’

Te Ao Hou, December 1962, Page 55

In the ‘Standards’ After about two years in the Infant Department Sonny will go into Standard One. He has learned to read, is everything going to be plain sailing now? In the Primer classes and the early Standards nearly all the child's time was spent in learning how to recognize words on a page, learning new words, and reading simple stories. Meanings were simple so that the stories could be read easily, and stories were told in a very few words, the words which any child who has learned English fairly well uses when he speaks—words such as come, little, see, dog, run, and so on. Now Sonny learned his English (and, I hope, his Maori too) from you and the rest of the family; if your English is not very fluent then he has to learn his correct English somewhere else. Teachers help a little, but his main learning will come from reading and writing You know, I can't think of any more important thing for a primary school child to do than read widely and well. Every day every one of us has to read something, whether it is for fun, to get information, or to keep ourselves alive! Put it this way—all the arithmetic we use we could learn