Elements of Practical Pedagogy

I love poring through the Google Books repository and thought it would be fun to semi-regularly link to a book I find there. Usually it's old educational books that I find most interesting, so I warn you. But there are all kinds of things to be found.

This one is a teaching handbook for the Christian Brothers founded by John Baptist de la Salle. I was going through some of my old papers and found a printed-out excerpt from the book. Some of it applies more to classroom teaching than to what we might do in our homeschools, but I thought some of the hints were quite valuable -- like setting up a chart of things to learn and then checking them off as the child shows himself able to "recite". It also talks about different types of teachings, including the use of manipulatives or visuals (the book calls this the "intuitive" approach).

You can click the pictures to go straight to the section of the book. Isn't that cool? Like a bookmark (it's called a "clip" over there at the Google library).





Some more documents or "Manuals" by the Christian Brothers are here.

His feast day is April 7 and he is the patron saint of Christian teachers.