Last, week, I shared a cursive penmanship certificate awarded to my father-in-law, Edward Stufflebean, one hundred years ago. It’s still in the family because his mom, Pearl, was a saver of photos and ephemera (papers, galore!).

The family treasures those items today, but there was lots more to school than earning certificates. There was the day-to-day work.

If your grandparents and/or parents are available, start asking them questions about their K-12 school years.

Do they remember the reading books from which they learned to read? How about arithmetic workbooks? Or history and science activities?

Has your family saved school items from long ago?

If not and if the older generation is already gone with no one left to ask, don’t give up!

Making our ancestors into more than just a list of vital records and a photograph requires learning about their life stories and education was definitely part of their life in some form.

To be honest, I don’t even remember the reading series my son used in elementary school. However, I do remember my own as I loved to read.

I’m from the Dick and Jane era, which was published by Scott, Foresman & Company. At least, my first readers in first and second grade were all Dick and Jane. I even remember sitting at my little second grade desk completing the workbook pages.

However, being a retired teacher, I know that school districts have a cycle for adoption of new textbooks. My district was on a six-year cycle, one year dedicated to reviewing and adopting a new textbook for a single subject.

I don’t know if my childhood school district just happened to change book companies when I started third grade or if someone had made the decision to change programs for third graders, but I left Dick and Jane behind and began the switch to more literature-based reading with Charles Merrill books, which I loved and hunted them down on eBay:

Treat Shop was the third grade reader, followed by Magic Carpet, Enchanted Isles and Adventure Lands. I always loved reading and was in the top reading group. We mastered Treat Shop part way through the year and moved onto the 4th grade reader. That meant by fifth grade, we were in Adventure Lands. I have to admit Magic Carpet had my favorite stories.

What arithmetic memories do you have? Although I did well in arithmetic, it wasn’t my favorite subject, by any means. Our little workbooks had a distinctive cover design and were still in use in the 1970s when I had begun my teaching career:

Unlike our reader company change in third grade, we continued with Laidlaw Brothers arithmetic books all through elementary school. See what I mean about the distinctive cover design? Very patriotic in bold red, white and blue.

I also found these Grade 3-6 books online, but I was surprised to see that my hubby had the same arithmetic books in his school! The Arithmetic Readiness book has his very neatly printed name with a new spelling variation – Sutfflebean! His parents were savers and he loves having a handful of his old school books as part of his school memories.

Laidlaw had a specific format to all the books. The left side always had word problems, or a test and the right side was practice computation.

Word problems definitely reflected ties to farming, as we learned about the size of bushel baskets, acres and even hectares, which was an obsolete land measure even in the 1950s. (It’s equivalent to about 2.4 acres.)

Finally, here are some of my husband’s other treasured workbooks:

His spelling series was by Charles Merrill and the Friends and Neighbors series is, like Dick and Jane, also part of Scott, Foresman, so it seems schools across the country were using very similar textbooks in the 1950s.

If your family has saved old school books, treasure them, but if you’d love to have them in your own collection, they are all quite inexpensive online.

These reading, arithmetic and spelling workbooks were an important part of your family members’ school days.