Webster Back Cover
Yesterday I published my personally typed edition of Webster’s 1908 Elementary Spelling Book. I call the new book, Noah Webster’s Spelling Book Method for Teaching Reading and Spelling for the Twenty-First Century. I have been working on this 166 page document since 2007. I was motivated to begin the project to republish Webster after reading Miss Geraldine Rodger’s article, “Why Webster’s Way Was the Right Way.” Like most educators, I did not realize that the spelling books were used to teach reading, not just spelling. The students learned to spell columns of words that were organized into orthographic units. The students started by learning the alphabet and then learned to sound-out groups of syllables in a syllabary. Then they proceeded to learn to spell literally thousands of words organized by orthographic principles.
The 1908 Elementary Spelling Book is essentially the same as the 1829 edition. Before 1829 Webster followed the common custom of putting numbers over the vowels to indicate the variable pronunciation of the vowel letters. In 1829 he switched to macron, breve, and other marks of pronunciation similar to those used in modern dictionaries. As I typed up more and more pages of Webster’s 1908 Spelling Book, I taught the pages to my students at the Odessa Christian School. The results were phenomenal. I saw student who had a long history of reading problems overcome their problems to become excellent readers and spellers. I sent the evolving manuscript to Mrs. Elizabeth Brown, who used it with her tutoring students. One of the main reasons I went to all the labor of preparing the book for publication for purchase was Mrs. Browns’ insistence that parents would rather purchase the book than run it off on a printer and bind it themselves.
You can purchase your spiral bound copy of Webster’s Spelling Book Method for Teaching Reading and Spelling for the Twenty-First Century from my Cafe Press Store.
http://www.cafepress.com/DonPotterTutoring
