© Duane A. Cline 1999
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The Hornbook Exercise The Pilgrims believed that everyone should seek the word of God in the Bible, which was now available in English
translations. In order to read the Bible, the young boys and girls were taught to read, using hornbooks. The hornbook was very rudimentary in that it gave the alphabet in both capital and small letters, the vowels, and samples of
syllable sounds. Sometimes the consonants were also included. This was generally followed by a Bible text and the Lord's
Prayer. The text was printed on paper or parchment and mounted on a board with a small handle. The text was then covered with a
protective sheet of transparent animal horn -- hence the name hornbook. In order to scrape the horn thin enough to be dimly
transparent, the horn had to be boiled in water to soften it and make it pliable. However, the scraping must be done quickly,
since the horn dries and hardens very rapidly when exposed to the air. Sometimes the text was painted directly on a paddle of wood and left unprotected by horn. When this was done, the paddle
was called a "battledore." A worksheet on the hornbook has been included in this packet as a way of demonstrating how the Pilgrim children learned
the basics of reading. It also demonstrates the use of the special " " for "s" in the middle of a word. The "s" as we know it
was only used as the final "s" in a word. Sometimes the lessons for pupils would be written in doggerel rhyme as an aid to memory. One of these, which is still
familiar today, was "Thirty days hath September. . ." The pupils may have had bits of paper on which to write out their lessons, but it would have been quite common for them to
use birch bark. If handled gently, birch bark served very well as a paper substitute. Lead pencils would have been rare in
those early days. More than likely the pupils would have used a "plummet" of lead -- real lead -- and not the graphite which
is used in pencils today. To make a hornbook use the enclosed worksheet. MATERIALS NEEDED: Instruct the pupils to color the outer edge and handle brown to resemble wood. The border surrounding the text represents
the strip of leather or brass which was tacked on the outer edges of the horn to hold the paper or parchment securely in
place. Therefore, that border could be colored either brown or yellow. Cut out the hornbook and glue it to a piece of corrugated cardboard. Cut out the mounted hornbook to complete it. If
desired, a sheet of acetate could be applied on top of the text to represent the horn covering.
Last modified October 7, 1999
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