During the work in printing, the teacher should not overlook or neglect any illustrative material that may be available, and which may be of value in setting standards, arousing ambitions, and offering suggestions for improvement. Visits to commercial print shops are an excellent thing from the standpoint of all these considerations. In studying the arrangements of the parts of a broken page, or of an advertisement, it has proved interesting and profitable to cut out the parts of the printed matter collected for study, and to reassemble them by pasting them to another page. The variety in the matter of margins, spacing, and grouping that can be had by such a treatment, is often really surprising. Then when there are added the possibilities of different sizes and kinds of type, the colors of ink, and the colors and textures of paper, the effects that may be produced are without limit.
METHOD OF TEACHING THE LOWER CASE
Each boy has a case before him. The class is told that there are three little groups of letters to be learned first: ar, is, jk. These groups are learned first, because they are not consecutive and do not readily fall into the grouping which is to follow.
After these first groups have been fixed in the mind, it is explained that the left half of the lower case is made up, for the most part, of groups of letters which are consecutive in the alphabet. These groups are: bcde, lmn (h) o, tuv. Besides jk on the left side there is another nonconsecutive group, qxz. These groups are repeatedly pointed out during the explanation. When we come to the group lmn (h) o, we say “lmn over h to o.”
Beginning with a, the class repeats several times these groups: bcde, lmn (h) o, tuv, qxz. Then it is pointed out that there are only two groups remaining, and that they are on the right hand side of the case. They are fg and ypw.
When the boys have located the groups a few times, they are tested on the entire alphabet in order. They begin, a, bcde, fg, and then they remember the “over h to o” expression, which locates h for them. The next letters, i and jk, are in the first groups learned and hence are easily recalled. Then follows the group lmno. If they do not readily locate p, the group ypw is repeated by the teacher. The letter q is in the corner group, qxz, r is in the first group learned, ar, and s is in the second group learned, is. The next letters, tuv, are in a group by themselves, and the remaining letters of the alphabet, w, x, y, z, are in the two remaining groups, ypw and qxz.
If at any time, a boy cannot locate a letter, he can be immediately assisted if the teacher will simply repeat the group in which the letter is to be found. For instance, if he cannot find x, the teacher should simply say “qxz.”
The location of quads, spaces, numerals, and “points” is only a matter of a short time, and may be learned at the time the letter boxes are learned, but can just as well be taught when an explanation of the quads and spaces is made.
It will be observed that by this plan, instead of learning the positions of twenty-six separate boxes, the boys learn the positions of the following nine groups: ar, is, jk, bcde, lmn (h) o, tuv, qxz, fg, ypw, which include the twenty-six.