The Get Wisdom! McGuffey's Eclectic First eReader Classroom Lessons for Teachers

By Ronald Kirk

The Christian McGuffey's Readers of the 1830s continue to offer some of the best Biblically sound and effective reading instruction. The Get Wisdom! Literacy Program provides the complete phonics, spelling, reading, and grammar curriculum for the greatest success in literacy education. This program tested over decades never failed to teach young people to read well, as well as train the mind for any undertaking in life, regardless of native ability or previous educational experience. Even children, adolescents and adults suffering dyslexia learned successfully to read, without exception in our experience.

The first and Christian McGuffey's Readers came as a series of four books, taking the learner from early phonetic practice to post graduate level literacy upon mastering the Fourth Reader.

These Classroom Lessons for Teachers provide background insight and complete reading lessons to enable teachers of any experience and accomplishment successfully to teach children to read with the Christian McGuffey's First Readers and First eReaders.

This first offering with Lessons for the First Reader builds upon the rigorous phonics and spelling training provided by the Get Wisdom! Literacy Program, published separately.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ronald Kirk
• Release date: Sep 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005949327

Ronald Kirk

Replacing atheistic behavioral psychology with an updated historical Biblical educational philosophy, Ron Kirk developed and tested custom teacher training and curriculum and classroom teaching of the school subjects in every grade from kindergarten to adult. Ron carefully identified educational purpose, methods, and strategic content, with startling results regardless of native gifting or educational experience. Challenged young people overcome toward remarkable accomplishment. Children and adults with poor education experiences likewise overcome their challenges, even dyslexia. Ready students soared beyond ordinary expectations, often advancing several years over their peers.

Book preview

Preface to the Get Wisdom! Literacy Program

These lessons accompany and supplement the Christian McGuffey’s Readers of the 1830s. The McGuffey’s Readers have stood the test of time in training reading and thinking skills. The schools I founded and led for twenty-five years never failed to produce high quality readers, including dyslexic students, even dyslexic adults.

As a pioneer applied Biblical faith educator, I determined to rid Christian education of the false religion of behavioral psychology which operates on the premise that man is environmentally and materialistically determined over eons through evolution. Therefore, behaviorism necessarily assumes man cannot fundamentally change in his mind and soul—his psyche—or his character, but education can only manipulate behavior, as with animals. This mind-boggling premise is blasphemous as it completely contradicts the Gospel of Jesus Christ which makes a new creature in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17). We found the guidance we needed in God’s Providential legacy in history and literature of Biblical thinking, education, life and action, based in the Biblical view of man, his purpose in God, and God’s universal and individual callings.

In order to effect the change from behaviorism so dominating the educational Christian literature, we found that we must create our own curriculum, often from scratch with assistance from the past. However, with McGuffey’s, though not perfect, we found a complete and serviceable system to take a child from basic phonetic reading in the First Reader, to—according to an advertisement by the Conservative Book Club in the 1980s—to a contemporary master’s degree level of literacy in the Fourth Reader.

For many years Mott Media has published these Christian McGuffey’s as the Original McGuffey’s Readers as print books to the blessing of many teachers and students. Mott as not interested in publishing their books as eReaders, but suggested I might publish them. I have. And now the Get Wisdom! McGuffey’s eReaders, these Lessons, and a phonics and spelling program provide the complete content and literacy curriculum. Tis curriculum will serve both the frantic home-school mom needing detailed day to day help, but also the intrepid teacher seeking to make the deep-dive toward becoming a master Christian education teacher.

The four-book Get Wisdom! McGuffey’s eReader set may be found on Amazon Kindle, and in ePub and PDF formats at http://getwisdom.us. Likewise, we are making available a complete phonics, spelling and grammar literacy curriculum. Lastly, we are in the process of publishing a complete package of applied Biblical worldview, and school and classroom teacher training. Other classroom subjects will follow soon—math, science, history, literature, and music.

Introductory Note

To bring children to understand words and stories by their own effort is the goal of learning to read. This is not a trivial task, and the teacher must work to bring complete thoughts to the young child. The more basic, the more difficult to define.

We adults, who take thoughts such as being for granted, are often at a loss to explain things in terms children understand. If possible, teach vocabulary words in terms the student already knows. To do this, the teacher must learn their working vocabularies, and build from there. As the McGuffey’s Reader itself says, the best means toward understanding is discussion.

Stories are typically about one idea—known as a premise. Just so, stories may contain details that help complete the story, yet do not comprise its main idea. Teachers should guide children, little by little over time, toward understanding what a story or theme is mostly about. This again is not a trivial ability for a child. Time and effort are the key to success.

Leading ideas or themes are even more difficult. They are the thoughts between the lines. That is, stories usually do not specify the theme, but the reader may yet understand it. Interestingly, an author may not even realize his own theme, but because it lies in his thoughts, his theme comes out as he expresses himself. The Bible calls recognizing a theme discernment (Proverbs 2; 1 Corinthians 12:10; Hebrews 5:14). Discernment is one of the key abilities and gifts from God, where good and evil are in constant battle. Christians must learn to distinguish deceptive themes from true and godly ones. If not, we will constantly suffer the resulting evil, rather than overcoming evil with good as we ought.

McGuffey gave a list of words for each lesson. Intended these as spelling lessons. Since we have adopted a system of spelling instruction based in Romalda Spalding’s phonics system, in our eBook version and prefer our system, we here call