Special method in primary reading and oral work with stories

Front matter

Class J. S> JMJL S

Copyright N"

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT.

Preface

This book attempts the discussion of two very important problems in primary education. First, the oral work in the handUng of stories, and second, the introduction to the art of reading in the earliest school work. The very close relation between the oral work in stories and the exercises in reading in the first three years in school is quite fully explained. The oral work in story-telling has gained a great importance in recent years, but has not received much discussion from writers of books on method.

Following this " Special Method in Primary Reading," a second volume, called the "Special Method in the Reading of Complete EngHsh Classics in the Grades of the Common School," completes the discussion of reading and literature in the intermediate and grammar grades.

Both of the books of Special Method are an application of the ideas discussed in " The Principles of General Method" and "The Method of the Recitation."

Vi PREFACE

Still Other volumes of Special Method in Geography, History, and Natural Science furnish the outlines of the courses of study in these subjects, and also a full discussion of the value of the material selected and of the method of treatment.

At the close of each chapter and at the end of the book a somewhat complete graded Hst of books, for the use of both pupils and teachers, is given. The same plan is followed in all the books of this series, so that teachers may be able to supply themselves with the best helps with as little trouble as possible.

CHARLES A. McMURRY.

CHAPTER I The Reason for Oral Work in Stories

The telling and reading of stories to children in early years, before they have mastered the art of reading, is of such importance as to awaken the serious thought of parents and teachers. To older people it is a source of constant surprise — the attentive interest which children bestow upon stories. Almost any kind of a story will command their wide-awake thought. But the tale which they can fully understand and enjoy has a unique power to concentrate their mental energy. There is an undivided, unalloyed absorption of mind in good stories which augurs well for all phases of later effort. To get children into this habit of undivided mental energy, of singleness of purpose in study, is most promising. In primary grades, the fluttering, scatter-brained truancy of thought is the chronic obstacle to success in study.

The telling or reading of stories to children naturally begins at home, before the little ones are old enough for school. The mother and father, the aunts and uncles, and any older person who delights in children, find true comfort and entertainment in rehearsing the famous stories to children. The Mother Goose, the fables, the fairy tales, the *' Arabian Nights," Eugene Field's and Stevenson's poems of child life, the Bible stories, the myths, and some of the old ballads have untold treasures for children. If one has a voice for singing the old melodies, the charm of music intensifies the effect. Little ones quickly memorize what delights them, and not seldom, after two or three readings, children of three and four years will be heard repeating whole poems or large parts of them. The repetition of the songs and stories till they become thoroughly famihar gives them their full educative effect. They become a part of the permanent furniture of the mind. If the things which the children learn in early years have been well selected from the real treasures of the past (of which there is a goodly store), the seeds of true culture have been deeply sown in their affections.

The opportunities of the home for good story-telling are almost boundless. Parents who perceive its worth and are willing to take time for it, find in this early period greater opportunity to mould the lives of children and put them into sympathetic touch with things of beauty and value than at any other time. At this age children are well-nigh wholly at the mercy of their elders. They will take what we give them and take it at its full worth or worthlessness. They absorb these things as the tender plant absorbs rain and sunshine.

The kindergarten has naturally found in the story one of its chief means of effectiveness. Stories, songs, and occupations are its staples. DeaUng with this same period of early childhood, before the more taxing work of the school begins, it finds that the children's minds move with that same freedom and spontaneity in these stories with which their bodies and physical energies disport themselves in games and occupations.

._ It is fortunate for childhood that we have such wholesome and healthful material, which is fitted to give a child's mental action a well-rounded completeness. His will, his sensibility, and his knowing faculty, all in one harmonious whole, are brought into full action. In short, not a fragment but the whole child is focussed and concentrated upon one absorbing object of thought.

The value of the oral treatment of stories is found in the greater clearness and interest with which they can be presented orally. There is a keener realism, a closer approximation to experimental facts, to the situations, the hardships, to the sorrows and triumphs of persons. The feehngs and impulses of the actors in the story are felt more sharply. The reality of the surrounding conditions and difficulties is presented so that a child transports himself by the power of sympathy and imagination into the scenes described.

There is no way by which this result can be accompHshed in early years except by the oral presentation of stories. Until the children have learned to read and have acquired sufficient mastery of the art of reading so that it is easy and fluent, there is no way by which they can get at good stories for themselves. Average children require about three years to acquire this mastery of the reading art. Not many children read stories from books, with enjoyment and appreciation, till they are nine or ten years old ; but from the age of four to ten they are capable of receiving an infinite amount of instruction and mental stimulus from hearing good stories. In fact, many of the best stories ever produced in the history of the world can be thoroughly enjoyed by children before they have learned to read. This is true of Grimm's and Andersen's stories, of the myths of Hiawatha and Norse- ^ land, and of the early Greeks, of the Bible stories, the "Arabian Nights," "Robin Hood," besides many other stories, poems, ballads, and biographies which are among the best things in our literature.

In these early years the minds of children may be enriched with a furnishment of ideas of much value for all their future use, a sort of capital well invested, which will bring rich returns. Minds early fertilized with this variety of thought material become more flexible, productive, and acquisitive.

For many years, and even centuries, it was supposed that early education could furnish children with little except the forms and instruments of knowledge, the tools of acquisition, such as ability to read, spell, and write, and to use simple numbers. But the susceptibiUty of younger children to the powerful culture influence of story, poem, and nature study, was overlooked.

We now have good reason to believe that there is no period when the educative and refining influences of good literature in the form of poems and story can be made so effective as in this early period from four to ten years. That period which has been long almost wholly devoted to the dry formalities and mechanics of knowledge, to the dull and oftentimes benumbing drills of alphabets, spelling, and arithmetical tables, is found to be capable of a fruitful study of stories, fables, and myths, and an indefinite extension of ideas and experiences in nature observation.

But the approach to these sunny fields of varied and vivid experience is not through books, except as the teacher's mind has assimilated their materials and prepared them for lively presentation.

The oral speech through which the stories are given to children is completely famihar to them, so that they, unencumbered by the forms of language, can give their undivided thought to the story. Oral speech is, therefore, the natural channel through which stories should come in early years. The book is at first wholly foreign to them, and it takes them three years or more of greater or less painful effort to get such easy mastery of printed forms as to gain ready access to thought in books. A book, when first put into the hands of a child, is a complete obstruction to thought. The oral story, on the contrary, is a perfectly transparent medium of thought. A child can see the meaning of a story through oral speech as one sees a landscape through a clear window-pane. If a child, therefore, up to the age of ten, is to get many and delightsome views into the fruitful fields of story-land, this miniature world of all realities, this repository of race ideas, it must be through oral speech which he has already acquired in the years of babyhood.

It is an interesting blunder of teachers, and one that shows their unreflecting acceptance of traditional customs, to assume that the all-absorbing problem of primary instruction is the acquisition of a new book language (the learning to read), and to ignore that rich mother tongue, already abundantly familiar, as an avenue of acquisition and culture. But we are now well convinced that the ability to read is an instrument of culture, not culture itself, and primarily the great object of education is to inoculate the children with the ideas of our civilization. The forms of expression are also of great value, but they are secondary and incidental as compared with the world of ideas.

THE REASON FOR ORAL WORK IN STORIES J

There is an intimate connection between learning to read and the oral treatment of stories in primary schools which is very interesting and suggestive to the teacher. Routine teachers may think it a waste of time to stop for the oral presentation of stories. But the more thoughtful and sympathetic teacher will think it better to stimulate the child's mind than to cram his memory. The young mind fertilized by ideas is quicker to learn the printed forms than a mind barren of thought. Yet this proposition needs to be seen and illustrated in many forms.

Children should doubtless make much progress in learning to read in the first year of school. But coincident with these exercises in primary reading, and, as a general thing, preliminary to them, is a lively and interested acquaintance with the best stories. It is a fine piece of educative work to cultivate in children, at the beginning of school life, a realrappreeiation and enjoyment of a few good stories. These stories, thus rendered familiar, and others of similar tone and quality, may serve well as a part of the reading lessons. It is hardly possible to cultivate this literary taste in the reading books alone, unrelieved by oral work. The primers and first readers, when examined, will give ample proof of this statement. In spite of the utmost effort of skilled primary teachers to make attractive books for primary children, our primers and first readers show unmistakable signs of their formal and mechanical character. They are essentially drill books.

It seems well, therefore, to have in primary schools two kinds of work in connection with story and reading, the oral work in story-telling, reproduction, expression, etc., and the drill exercises in learning to read. The former will keep up a wide-awake interest in the best thought materials suitable for children, the latter will gradually acquaint them with the necessary forms of written and printed language. Moreover, the interest aroused in the stories is constantly transferring itself to the reading lessons and giving greater spirit and vitality even to the primary efforts at learning to read. In discussing the method of primary reading we shall have occasion to mention the varied devices of games, activities, drawings, dramatic action, blackboard exercises, and picture work, by which an alert primary teacher puts life and motive into early reading work, but fully as important as all these things put together is the growing insight and appreciation for good stories. When a child makes the discovery, as Hugh Miller said, ** that learning to read is learning to get stories out of books " he has struck the chord that should vibrate through all his future life. The real motive for reading is to get something worth the effort of reading. Even if it takes longer to accomplish the result in this way, the result when accomplished is in all respects more valuable. But it is probable that children will learn to read fully as soon who spend a good share of their time in oral story work.

In discussing the literary materials used in the first four grades, we suggest the following grading of certain large groups of literary matter, and the relation of oral work to the reading in each subsequent grade is clearly marked.

ist Grade.

2d Grade.

^d Grade.

Oral Work.

Games, Mother Goose.

Fables, Fairy Tales.

Nature Myths, Child Poems.

Robinson Crusoe.

Hiawatha.

Seven Little Sisters.

Reading.

Lessons based on Games, etc.

Board Exercises.

Primers, First Readers.

Simple Myths, Stories, etc.

Fables, Fairy Tales.

Myths and Poems.

Second Readers.

Hiawatha Primer.

Greek and Norse Myths. Robinson Crusoe.

Ballads and Legendary Stories. Andersen's & Grimm's Tales.

Ulysses, Jason, Siegfried. Child's Garden of Verses.

Old Testament Stories. Third Readers.

4th Grade. American Pioneer History Greek and Norse Myths.

Stories. Historical Ballads.

Early Biographical Stories of Ulysses, Arabian Nights.

Europe, as Alfred, Solon, Hiawatha, Wonder Book. Arminius, etc.

This close dependence of reading proper, in earlier years, upon the oral treatment of stories as a preliminary, is based fundamentally upon the idea that suitable and interesting thought matter is the true basis of progress in reading, and that the strengthening of the taste for good books is a much greater thing than the mere acquisition of the art of reading. The motive with which children read or try to learn to read is, after all, of the greatest consequence.

The old notion that children must first learn to read and then find, through the mastery of this art, the entrance to literature is exactly reversed. First awaken a desire for things worth reading, and then incorporate these and similar stories into the regular reading exercises as far as possible.

In accordance with this plan, children, by the time they are nine or ten years old, will become heartily acquainted with three or four of the great classes of literature, the fables, fairy tales, myths, and such world stories as Crusoe, Aladdin, Hiawatha, and Ulysses. Moreover, the oral treatment will bring these persons and actions closer to their thought and experience than the later reading alone could do. In fact, if children have reached their tenth year without enjoying those great forms of literature that are appropriate to childhood, there is small prospect that they will ever acquire a taste for them. They have passed beyond the age where a liking for such literature is most easily and naturally cultivated. They move on to other things. They have passed through one great stage of education and have emerged with a meagre and barren outfit.

The importance of oral work as a lively means of entrance to studies is seen also in other branches besides literature.

In geography and history the first year or two of introductory study is planned for the best schools in the form of oral narrative and discussion. Home

THE REASON FOR ORAL WORK IN STORIES II

geography in the third or fourth year, and history stories in the fourth and fifth years of school, are best presented without a text book by the teacher. Although the children have already overcome, to some extent, the difficulty of reading, so great is the power of oral presentation and discussion to vivify and realize geographical and historical scenes that the book is discarded at first for the oral treatment.

In natural science also, from the first year on the teacher must employ an oral method of treatment. The use of books is not only impossible, but even after the children have learned to read, it would defeat the main purpose of instruction to make books the chief means of study. The ability to observe and discern things, to use their own senses in discriminating and comparing objects, in experiments and investigations, is the fundamental purpose.

In language lessons, again, it is much better to use a book only as a guide and to handle the lessons orally, collecting examples and stories from other studies as the basis for language discussions.

It is apparent from this brief survey that an oral method is appropriate to the early treatment of all the common school studies, that it gives greater vivacity, intensity, simplicity, and clearness to all such introductory studies.

The importance of story-telling and the initiation of children into the delightful fields of literature through the teacher rather than through the book are found to harmonize with a mode of treatment common to all the studies in early years.

In this connection it is interesting to observe that the early literature of the European nations was developed and communicated to the people by word of mouth. The Homeric songs were chanted or sung at the courts of princes. At Athens, in her palmy days, the great dramatists and poets either recited their productions to the people or had them presented to thousands of citizens in the open-air theatres. Even historians like Thucidides read or recited their great histories before the assembled people. In the early history of England, Scotland, and other countries, the minstrels sang their ballads and epic poems in the baronial halls and thus developed the early forms of imusic and poetry. Shakespeare wrote his dramas for the theatre, and he seems to have paid no attention at all to their appearance in book form, never revising them or putting them into shape for the press.

This practice of all the early races of putting their great literature before the people by song, dramatic action, and word of mouth is very suggestive to the teacher. The power and effectiveness of this mode of presentation, not only in early times but even in the highly civilized cities of London and Athens, is unmistakable proof of the educative value of such modes of teaching. This is only another indication of the kinship of child life with race life, which has been emphasized by many great thinkers.

The oral method offers a better avenue for all vigorous modes of expression than the reading book. It can be observed that the general tendency of the book is toward a formal, expressionless style in young readers. Go into a class where the teacher is handling a story orally and you will see her falHng naturally into all forms of vivid narrative and presentation, gesture, facial expression, versatile intonation, blackboard sketching and picture work, the impersonation of characters in dialogue, dramatic action, and general liveliness of manner. The children naturally take up these same activities and modes of uttering themselves. Even without the suggestion of teachers, little children express themselves in such actions, attitudes, and impersonations. This may be often observed in little boys and girls of kindergarten age, when telling their experiences to older persons, or when playing among themselves. The freedom, activity, and vivacity of children is, indeed, in strong contrast to the apathetic, expressionless, monotonous style of many grown people, including teachers.

But the oral treatment of stories has a tendency to work out into modes of activity even more effective than those just described.

In recent years, since so much oral work has been done in elementary schools, children have been encouraged also to express themselves freely in blackboard drawings and in pencil work at their desks by way of illustrating the stories told. Moreover, in paper cutting, to represent persons and scenes, in clay modelling, to mould objects presented, and in constructive and building efforts, in making forts, tents, houses, tools, dress, and in showing up modes of life, the children have found free scope for their physical and mental activities. These have not only led to greater clearness and vividness in their mental conceptions, but have opened out new fields of self-activity and inventiveness.

So long as work in reading and literature was confined to the book exercises, nearly all these modes of expression were little employed and even tabooed.

Finally, the free use of oral narrative in the literature of early years, in story-telling and its attendant modes of expression, opens up to primary teachers a rare opportunity of becoming genuine educators. There was a time, and it still continues with many primary teachers, when teaching children to read was a matter of pure routine, of formal verbal drills and repetitions, as tiresome to the teacher, if possible, as to the little ones. But now that literature, with its treasures of thought and feeling, of culture and refinement, has become the staple of the primary school, teachers have a wide and rich field of inspiring study. The mastery and use of much of the preferred literature which has dropped down to us out of the past is the peculiar function of the primary teacher. Contact with great minds, like those of Kingsley, Ruskin, Andersen, the Grimm brothers, Stevenson, Dickens, Hawthorne, De Foe, Browning, ^sop. Homer, and the unknown authors of many of the best ballads, epics, and stories, is enough to give the primary teacher a sense of the dignity of her work. On the other hand, the opportunity to give to children the free and versatile development of their active powers is an equal encouragement.

Teachers who have taken up with zeal this great problem of introducing children to their full birthright, the choice literature of the world suited to their years, and of linking this story work with primary reading so as to give it vitality, — such teachers have found school life assuming new and unwonted charms ; the great problems of the educator have become theirs; the broadened opportunity for the acquisition of varied skill and professional efficiency has given a strong ambitious tone to their work.

CHAPTER II The Basis of Skill in Oral Work

Accepting the statement that skill in oral presentation of a story is a prime demand in early education, the important question for teachers is how to cultivate their resources in this phase of teaching, how to become good story-tellers.

It may be remarked that, for the great majority of people, story-telling is not a gift but an acquisition. There are, of course, occasional geniuses, but they may be left out of consideration. They are not often found in the schoolroom any more than in other walks of life. What we need is a practical, sensible development of a power which we all possess in varying degrees. Nor is it the fluent, volatile, verbose talker who makes a good oral teacher, but rather one who can see and think clearly : one who knows how to combine his ideas and experiences into clear and connected series of thought.

We may proceed, therefore, to a discussion of the needs and resources of a good story-teller.

I. Without much precaution it may be stated that he should have a rich experience in all the essential realities of human life. This covers a large field of

i6 common things and refers rather to contact with life than to mere book knowledge. Yet it is the depth, heartiness, and variety of knowledge rather than the source from which it springs that concerns us. Books often give us just this deep penetrating experience, as soon as we learn how to select and use them. We need to know human life directly and in all sorts of acts, habits, feelings, motives, and conditions, — something as Shakespeare knew it, only within the compass of our narrower possibilities. Likewise the physical world with its visible and invisible forces and objects besetting us on every side. These things must impress themselves upon us vividly in detail as well as in the bulk. The hand that has been calloused by skill-producing labor, the back that aches with burdens bravely borne, the brain that has sweat with strong effort, are expressions of this kind of knowledge of the world. Cleargrained perceptions are acquired from many sources : from travel, labor, books, reflection, sickness, observation. I go to-day into a small shop where heavy oak beer-kegs are made, and watch the man working this refractory material into water-tight kegs that will stand hard usage at the hands of hard drinkers for twenty years. If my mind has been at work as I watch this man for an hour, with his heavy rough staves made by hand, his tools and machines, his skill and strong muscular action, the amount and profit of his labor, that man's work has gone deep c l8 SPECIAL METHOD IN PRIMARY READING

into my whole being. I can almost live his life in an hour's time, and feel its contact with the acute problems of our modern industrial life. That is a kind of knowledge and experience worth fully as much as a sermon in Trinity Church or a University lecture.

The teacher needs a great store of these concrete facts and illustrations. Without them he is a carpenter without tools or boards. He needs to know industries, occupations, good novels, typical life scenes, sunsets, sorrows, joys, inventions, poets, farmers — all such common, tangible things. Even from fools and blackguards he can get experiences that will last him a lifetime if they only strike in and do not flare off into nothingness.

Social experience in all sorts of human natures, disposition, and environing circumstance is immediately valuable to the teacher.

Close acquaintance with children, with their early feelings and experiences, with their timidity or boldness, with their whims or conceits, their dislikes and preferences, their enthusiasms and interests, with their peculiar home and neighborhood experiences and surroundings, with their games and entertainments, with the books and papers they read, with their dolls and playthings, their vacations and outings, with their pets and playhouses, with their tools and mechanical contrivances — all these and other like realities of child life put the teacher on a footing of possible appreciation and sympathy with children. These are the materials and facts which a good teacher knows how to work up in oral recitations. Of course the kindly, sympathetic social mood which is not fretted by others' frailties and perversities, but, like Irving or Addison, exhibits a liberal charity or humorous affection for all things human, is a fortunate possession or acquisition for the teacher. / 2. It may be said also, without fear of violent con- "^radiction, that a teacher needs to be a master of the story he is about to tell. It may be well to spread out to view the important things necessary to such a mastery. The reading over of the story till its facts and episodes have become familiar and can be reproduced in easy narrative is at least a minimum requirement. Even this moderate demand is much more serious than the old text-book routine in history or reading, where the teacher, with one eye on the book, the other on the class, and his finger at the place, managed to get the questions before the class in a fixed order.

Let us look a little beneath the surface of the story. What is its central idea, the author's aim or motive in producing it ? Not a little effort and reflection may be necessary to get at the bottom of this question. Some of the most famous stories, like " Aladdin," "Gulliver's Travels," and the "City Musicians," may be so wild and wayward as to elude or blunt the point of this question. The story may have a hard shell, but the sharp teeth of reflection will get at the sweet kernel within, else the story is not worth while. In some of the stories, like " Baucis and Philemon," "The Great Stone Face," "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," "The Discontented Pine Tree," and "Hiawatha's Fasting," the main truth is easily reflected from the story and caught up even by the children.

This need for getting at the heart of the story is clearly seen in all the subsequent work. It is the exercise of such a critical judgment which qualifies the teacher to discriminate between good and poor stories. In the treatment of the story the essential topics are laid out upon the basis of this controlling idea or motive. The leading aims and carefully worded questions point toward this central truth. The side lights and attendant episodes are arranged with reference to it like the scenes in a drama. The effort to get at the central truth and the related ideas is a sifting-out process, a mode of assimilating and mastering the story more thorough-going than the mere memorizing of the facts and words for the purpose of narration. The thought-getting self-activity and common-sense logic which are involved in this mode of assimilating a story are good for both pupils and teacher.

The mastery of a story needed by an oral teacher implies abundance of resource in illustrative device and explanation. When children fail to grasp an idea, it is necessary to fall back upon some familiar object or experience not mentioned in the book. Emergencies arise which tax the teacher's ingenuity to the utmost. Even the children will raise queries that baffle his wit. In preparing a story for the classroom it is necessary to see it from many sides, to foresee these problems and difficulties. Oftentimes the collateral knowledge derived from history or geography or from similar episodes in other stories will suggest the solution.