One morning the directress gave Olga new materials with which to work. There was a big, white wood box divided into twenty-six compartments, and in each compartment there was a huge letter of the alphabet cut from pink or blue cardboard. The blue letters were consonants; the pink letters were vowels. Seated on a soft green rug on the floor, Olga spent hours taking the letters out of their places, piling them in a colored heap of many fascinating curves and angles, then sorting them and putting each back in a compartment in the box.
Sometimes, as Olga worked, the slim girl directress dropped down on the rug beside her. Picking up one of the cardboard letters, she would say:
“This is A, Olga.”
“This is A,” Olga would repeat.
“Can you show me another A?” the directress would then ask. And Olga would, readily, pick out a similar letter.
“Where is A, Olga?” was the last question in this teaching as Olga selected from the twenty-six letters another A. So the little maid of four years soon knew all the letters by name and sound. And presently she was combining them to make words and short sentences.
Building words with the movable alphabet.
As she laid together the letters that made up each word, the words that combined to make sentences, the directress analyzed each word for her, phonetically. Soon, by hearing a word, distinctly pronounced, Olga could select from her box of pink and blue symbols which represented sounds to her now those letters which were necessary to spell the word.
The directress presented to her smooth white cards, on which were mounted large black letters cut from coarse black emery cloth, as rough as sandpaper. These letter cards Olga held in one hand, tracing the outline of the letters with the fingers of her other hand and saturating her senses with the feeling of the letter shapes. Soon, she could name any letter, her eyes closed, by the sense of touch.