This girl learned to purl

If I could learn to teach kids to learn to knit from this book, I could certainly teach myself the purl stitch. I learned the knit stitch years ago and could not for the life of me figure out how to purl. The sentence that I did not read during my first attempts was "WITH THE YARN IN THE FRONT". I kept ending up with twenty three stitches instead of twenty. I had holes, I FINALLY figured out while working with some varigated yarn how to make sure I was picking up the first stitch and then realized that it was only able to do it with the yarn in the front. So now my rule is yarn in front with the purl and in the back with the knit.

1. Learning to Purl. Uneven stitches and all, the yarn is in the front and I am getting the ribbing pattern.
   
2. The pattern I was trying said purl one row, knit one row, but I only read the purl part. Reading the directions is VERY important when learning from a book. I guess I was a perfect candidate for this book - large print, lots of pictures and geared toward the beginner.
   
3. This is the correct way that pattern was to be worked. I think this is called a stockinette stitch.
4. I once heard my sister(who thinks knitting is easy and crocheting is too complicated to learn) say, knit one purl two, while she was working on a project, so I tried it, but I was working on an odd number of stitches. I will try it again on another practice piece.

* dropped stitch holes, to be expected when you first practice.

Now on to Lesson 5: Increasing & Decreasing.