Starting Grade One

I started school in 1968. (I remember the klaxon that sounded every hour or so to indicate changing periods.) I could read comic books at age four, and I quickly got through the pink pre-primer before going on to the green primer.

I remember that we first learned to print letters, then learned the cursive script.  It must have been a challenge for some of the kids to learn the second way when they'd just figured out the first!  I guess that's a challenge that today's kids don't have to deal with...

In our reading courses we had American texts like the Lippincott readers, so there was a lot of American history:  stuff like Kit Carson and the guy who wrote the poem about the night before Christmas.  For some reason, I remember reading about the childhood of the American singer Jenny Lind.  And there was a third-grade story about a young man who'd lost his whole family in a forest fire and swiped a rich man's coat, but when he found all the money inside he mailed it back to him. (He just wanted a coat!)

In Grade 3 we had a course about space!