Schoolhouse
Of prime importance in any community is the education of its children. Schools were often the first public building. Students of all ages attended in one room with one teacher, who often roomed with families of students. Older students may have been asked to tend the fire and pump the water.
SCHOOLHOUSE
School Reading
Pull the rope gently once to ring the school bell on top of the schoolhouse. When the children heard that bell, they knew it was time to be at their desks. One-room schools had students of all grades, depending on the ages of children living in the area and learning together at their own rate. There was only one teacher who circulated through the room helping one student at a time or breaking them into groups according to their needs, with older students helping younger students. The teacher often had the privilege of boarding with students and their families.
Older students were given the responsibility of bringing in water or carrying in coal or wood for the stove. The younger students would be given responsibilities according to their size and gender such as cleaning the blackboard (chalkboard), taking the erasers outside for dusting, sweeping the floor, plus other duties that they were capable of doing.
The pitcher and basin were for the children to wash their hands and faces. The ladle in the pail of water was used for drinking by everyone at the school. (Today’s standards of hygiene were not practiced in those days!) Skates, jump ropes and other items often hung near the door to be ready for fun during recess or before and after school. The teacher used the brass bell on the desk to bring order to the classroom. A clock generally hung on the wall and pictures of Washington and Lincoln were usually to be found in schoolrooms.
Notice that the student desks have “inkwells” in the upper right-hand corner. Children in school learned to write with liquid ink from those flip-top inkwells and either quills or steel-pointed “pens”. To write, one simply fitted a point into a simple holder, dipped it in an inkwell, wrote a line, dipped, wrote a line, dipped, etc. As you can see from the blackboard, one of the skills stressed those days was legible penmanship. Equal importance was giving to reading and arithmetic. Reading, “riting, and ‘rithmetic became known as the 3 Rs and were to be mastered before the students could graduate from one class to another.
