Finding gold in an old public school textbook

I recently discovered a mint-condition 1950s textbook on spelling while rummaging through my book collection (accumulation).

The main textual body of the book consists of six units, each featuring six mini-chapters of two pages each.

The topics of the six units are:

Forerunners of Progress

Lands and Peoples

Personal Money Magagement

How to Write Letters

The Democratic Way of Life

Choosing Your Career

Some of the Unit sub-topics:

Explorers in the Arctic

Charles Goodyear

Guglielmo Marconi

India– The Land of Contrasts

Australia

How the Bank Serves Your Father

Dad Buys Insurance

The Business Letter

Friendly letters

Let Words Be Your Messengers

Citizenship-In a Democracy

Individual Rights In a Democracy

National Governments In a Democracy

Doctor or Lawyer?

Helping to Educate Our Citizens

The book also has a 23-page dictionary explaining different words used in the test.

Yet this was not a social studies textbook, civics textbook, geography, or history textbook…

It is the Grade 8 My Spelling textbook for Canadian schools, used during the 1950s. (1)

Other topics the textbook covers include:

Rules to help you spell

Letters and syllables

Suffixes and prefixes

Special Words

Brain-Teasers

The hundred word-demons

How this textbook was used in class

The section titled, Suggestions for Grade Eight explains the basis of the book:

“Grade Eight My Spelling teaches twenty new words weekly. A total of 600 new words is presented during the year.”

“The directions for conducting the week’s work, on pages 7 to 9, should be read and discussed by the teacher and pupils so that every child understands just what is to be done each day. The exercises called Working With Words are planned for individual study.”

(1) My Spelling Grade Eight, by Gerald A. Yoakam and Seward E. Daw, published by Ginn and Company, Toronto

_____ Dennis Mellersh, content journalist