A Kindergarten Drawing Book. Part 1—Straight Lines
A Kindergarten Drawing Book. Part 1—Straight Lines
A Kindergarten Drawing Book. Part 1—Straight Lines
A Kindergarten Drawing Book. Part 1—Straight Lines
A Kindergarten Drawing Book. Part 1—Straight Lines
A Kindergarten Drawing Book. Part 1—Straight Lines
A Kindergarten Drawing Book. Part 1—Straight Lines
A Kindergarten Drawing Book. Part 1—Straight Lines
A Kindergarten Drawing Book. Part 1—Straight Lines
A Kindergarten Drawing Book. Part 1—Straight Lines
Rooper, T. E. [T. G.; Thomas Godolphin Rooper]

A Kindergarten Drawing Book. Part 1—Straight Lines


London: Griffith, Farran & Co., ca. 1885-1890.

Five Hundred Blackboard Drawing Lessons for Infants' Classes. Griffith, Farran & Co.'s Educational Series. Red cloth 8vo, 8.5 x 6.5 inches; (iv), 40pp. Sunning to spine and water droplets on the covers; tidemark and short residual bleed at the bottom corner of the textblock. Two pages with red and blue pencil marks, otherwise intermittently foxed but clean. Author's name printed "T. E. Rooper" but appears in publisher's ads as T. G. and is elsewhere attributed to Thomas Godolphin Rooper. No date or edition specified--likely an early reprint of the first edition, published under the Griffith, Farran, Okeden & Welsh imprint. 5 copies of the general title listed in OCLC; 1 copy of this edition located in Japan.

The exercises compiled by Rooper are based on Pestalozzian principles of physical education, who notes that the exercises can be applied not just to drawing, but to other occupations like stick laying and pricking. He emphasizes using the drawing exercises to practice speaking English and counting numbers, and explicitly mentions the lessons' usefulness in connection to Schneyer's lessons (First Lessons in Arithmetic) and Tillich's Brick Box.

Thomas Godolphin Rooper (1847-1903) was an educationist who served as Inspector of Schools in Bradford, England. He was a personal friend of education reformer Charlotte Mason and a founding member of the Parents' National Educational Union (PNEU). After his death at 56, Mason published "A Modern Educator: Thomas Godolphin Rooper" in her book Formation of Character. Her warm remembrance characterizes Rooper as a passionate and disciplined advocate of Pestalozzian principles. She praised his "refreshing" writings for elucidating elements of child psychology, and his inclusion of "mentally deficient children" in implementing those principles in common education. Rooper contributed regularly to the PNEU monthly "Parents' Review" and published several other works on object teaching; most notably Apperception: or, The Essential Mental Operation in the Act of Learning ("A pot of green feathers").