Author: Jane Andrews

In 1860 a schoolmistress in Newburyport, Massachusetts opened a small primary class in her own home and kept it running for twenty-five years, teaching Alice Stone Blackwell and Ethel Parton among others. Jane Andrews (1833 to 1887) had graduated as valedictorian from the State Normal School at West Newton in 1853, and was also the first student to register at Horace Mann's Antioch College, though a spinal complaint ended that after a year. Her geography lessons needed better material than the textbooks offered, so she wrote her own. The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball That Floats in the Air, published in 1861, carries young readers to seven children living in seven different climates; it sold close to half a million copies over the following century and was translated into German, Chinese and Japanese. The Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children, published in 1888 after her death, gathers short natural-history tales on amber, coral, water lilies, dragonflies and Indian corn. Child's Health Primer for Primary Classes, issued in 1885 as the opening volume of the Pathfinder physiology series, was endorsed by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and taught hygiene alongside warnings about alcohol and tobacco.