A nation’s literacy starts with teaching young children to read. In the United States, that task typically starts with first grade for six-year-old children, although pre-literacy learning occurs earlier in the preschool and kindergarten years. Regularly reading good books to younger children can prepare their minds and hearts for learning to read and can give them an interest in reading books for themselves. The actual process of teaching a child to read usually requires early readers, books that tell a story yet have simple vocabulary and sentence structure that an early reader can learn to decode without frustration. This combination of a good story and simplicity can be surprisingly hard to get right. I grew up on the Dick and Jane readers. When I was six years old, I had no opinion on their quality, of course, but we later used a few in teaching our children how to read in our homeschooling years. I liked them and they were effective but the level of story interest in them I admit could have used a little improvement.
Plumfield Press, a Plumfield Moms Project, has started reprinting titles from the Cowboy Sam learn-to-read series, written by Edna Walker Chandler. Four of these titles are: Cowboy Sam and Dandy, Cowboy Sam and Big Bill, Cowboy Sam and Freckles and Cowboy Sam and Miss Lily. Plumfield Press has kept the words and pictures the same but have used graphic computer tools to brighten the colors in the picture to make each book more attractive for children. The books are paperback bound, with beautiful glossy white paper and crisp text and images. Each book is made up of six parts, called “Stories” in the table of contents but which are really chapters, since the stories are linked together into one narrative in each book. The words are simple but convey, in conjunction with the pictures, gentle humor and friendship between cowboys Sam and Shorty and between the men and their horses.
The pictures play more than a decorative role. For example, in Cowboy Sam and Dandy, Sam breaks the young horse Dandy to the saddle. When Sam saddles Dandy for the first time, the text reads “Cowboy Sam did something to Dandy. Dandy did not like this.” The accompanying picture shows Sam putting a saddle on Dandy, which is how the child reader knows to what the text is referring. There is a close connection between illustration and text, which is how it should be in books used to teach children to read. In addition, the text slips in other instruction, widening the child’s knowledge of his or her world. For instance, in the same book, the child learns that horses and cows need grass and water, horses can smell water, prairie dogs exist, foals drink milk, horses can sense avalanches before cowboys can, and horses need to be trained to take a saddle and be ridden. The reader is also implicitly taught to be kind to animals and to each other, to work together, and to learn about the kinds of work that cowboys do.
The other three titles are similar and equally as ingenious in the marriage between pictures and text, with the same gentle humor and friendliness, and the same kind of subtle teaching about things like county fairs, making pies, variety in food, and raising pets. Freckles the cat and Lily the skunk play amusing roles in the Cowboy Sam series, which are linked together by the common cast of human and animal characters. For young children, this series will certainly enliven the process of learning to read!