Millbrook Discovery Mathematics For Top Infants And Lower Juniors: CAPACITY, Printed by ESA in England 1967. Such a strange and wonderful "workbook" because the very first page does nothing but send children home for objects.
The opening salvo is the assumption and announcement that homes, no matter how impoverished, contain precious equipment necessary to mathing about.
A debut illustration is of children spilling down a sidewalk, waving at one another and chatting, as they clutch in their arms and hands oversized cooking spoons, tea tins, washbasins, plastic pails, watering cans with elongated spouts, dented kettles and empty marmite jars.
Such treasures!
Isn't it wonderful to own and loan something that school truly needs but cannot supply without YOUR help.
Work areas look like a cross between a flea market and The Container Store, with watering troughs shoved up against rickety, wooden tables crowded with any object capable of holding liquid.
Apparently no one cycles off to the Teacher Store for pre-made wall decorations because the little ones are hunched over huge sheets of chart paper drawing careful and imaginative renderings of receptacles that hold MORE than 1 pint and LESS than 1 pint.
Such investment of time and attention to detail must be its own kind of neurological impress, as it goes on for weeks before a produce scale or a spring balance ever makes an appearance.
The non-standardized gives birth to the standardized and it is clear that THIS is how a successful journey begins to the mastery and mystery of so-called Standards.
