McGuffey readers offer a proven reading curriculum for classroom and home school.
This hardback McGuffey book has 422 pages and is recommended for grades 9-12. Develops advanced vocabulary and thinking skills. Introduces some of the greatest English authors_ Webster, Jefferson, Shakespeare, Johnson, Schiller and others. Students will read of Napoleon and Wilberforce, of Jesus and the Apostle Paul. They will ponder death, good and evil, the Bible, eternity, duty, and God. Elocution helps included. May be used at high school level, although some schools use it with good readers in junior high.
Learning to read the McGuffey way offers: Phonics foundations, Moral growth, and Rich vocabulary. How would McGuffey teach reading if he were here today? His first concern would be that the content should promote moral growth and excellence of mind in habits, attitudes, and literary tastes. And Bible selections would be at the top of his reading list.
McGuffey also believed in phonics for beginning reading. Methods and timing should be adapted to the individuality of each child. Parents should not send their dearest treasure off to school too early in life, but should proceed at the child's own pace. This preserves the vigor of his mental action.
McGuffey believed in memorizing as a way to develop habits of attention that promote understanding and mastery of ALL learning, even those studies which are not memorized.
McGuffey believed that an obvious result of a cultivated mind is a wide vocabulary. And the best way to cultivate a wide vocabulary is to learn words in their context, as in studying the important ideas and noble thoughts presented in the Readers.
These principles produce the education that shaped American character, particularly in the West, for over one hundred years. It's the kind of education the majority of Americans want and need today. IT'S TIME FOR THE CLASSICS AGAIN.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William Holmes McGuffey [1800-1873] was a "born" educator. Beginning by teaching his younger brothers and sisters, William McGuffey accepted his first teaching position at 13 in a one-room school with 48 students. After graduating from Washington College and being ordained as a Presbyterian minister, he taught moral philosophy at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio for almost ten years. It was during this period that McGuffey wrote and compiled the Readers which made him famous. Later McGuffey rose to the rank of university president, serving Cincinnati College and Ohio University, but spent the final third of his life teaching moral philosophy at the University of Virginia. | 
