Somebody yesterday mentioned 'Janet and John'. Janet and John is a reading scheme used widely in the UK for decades. There was another one called 'Peter and Jane'. When Peter and Jonnet were related to Potter and Jane, I have no idea, butthey all spent hours playing in a garden watching their dog and saying 'see the dog. See the little dog run. Run dog run.' I suppose by the time they got to Book 91 the dog was a Chihuahua and the sentence continued 'run, dog, run, next door's Abyssinian cat is in the asparagus bed and you can chase it up the sycamore tree if you get a good start'.
My first school reader, as far as I recall, was about a big red lorry that went up the hill, shedding its load of pots and pans as it went. We were too young to read words like 'hazardous' and 'prosecuted', so we never found out if the driver of the big red lorry was nicked for driving with an unsecured load and sending pots and pans crashing about like Gordon Ramsay's kitchen. My children grew up with the Ginn Look and Say scheme. The first sentences were 'Look!' 'Look in here' 'Is it in here?' which was great, because we could organise treasure hunts.
Those were the first school readers, but the first books we knew were the ones read to us at bedtime. For me, it was Beatrix Potter. If you can remember your first books, please will you tell the rest of us? Now please excuse me. There is a very fluffy cat up the sycamore tree.
4 comments:
Ooooh, Betrix Potter. I did reserch on her, and, in Fhreshmen year, I looked at a bio of her. I loved the pitures. She's a great artist.
Well, yeasterday I went to the dr. Now, i'm on antibotics, 2 inhalers, hevey duty mega sever cough syurp... Yeahhh, but it's my lungs now and a server cough. Stupid virus..
Made some new friends on YWS :D
However, I'm over the virus, now just the coughing... Is it still snowing?
I love Beatrix Potter! Those were some bedtime favorites of mine, too.
There was this story I loved called "The Elephant and the Bad Baby," which is basically about a naughty baby who rides an elephant around town and makes the elephant nick things (mostly food) from shops. So as the story goes on, more and more people like the baker and the butcher go chasing down the road after the elephant until he has a whole parade of angry shopkeepers running after him. I loved how the story used the words "rumpeta, rumpeta" to describe the elephant stomping down the road--which is exactly how I imagine a stomping elephant would sound!
Do you know who wrote the story about the little red lorry and pots and pans? Desperate to get a copy for my dad. Very sentimental, as his 3 kids all learnt to read with it.
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