Manual for the Child classics primer

Foreword

*'Why do a boy's hands blister so much quicker on a hoe-handle than on a baseball bat?"

Because dislike of the task on the one hand makes him expect the blister before it comes, and delight in the game on the other, leaves him unconscious of the blister when it does arrive!

To boy winners in great corn-growing contests, hoe-handles become as baseball bats!

The purpose of this Manual is to help teachers to transform hoe-handles into baseball bats, by arousing in pupils that interest in reading which turns work into play; the sort of interest which the Child Classics series makes it not only possible but easy to secure.

Thanks are due to Miss Lena Board of Jeffersonville, Indiana, and to Miss Estelle Fisher and Miss Georgia Alexander, of Indianapolis, Indiana, for much kind assistance and many helpful suggestions.

The Author.

CONTENTS Part I

PAGE

The New Path 7

What Is Reading? 10

"Thought" and "Words" 11

Mastering Words 12

Devices 14

Word and Phonic Drill Cards 23

Alphabet Song 27

Getting Thought 29

Reading from the Blackboard.

- Suggestive Lesson I. John and Kate 31

Suggestive Lesson IL Carlo and Kitty 35

Suggestive Lesson IIL Action Words 37

Suggestive Lesson IV. See 39

Suggestive Lesson V. I like 40

Suggestive Lesson \l. The Analysis of the Sentence 41

Suggestive Lesson VI L Construction of New

Sentences 42

Suggestive Lesson VIII. Roll the Ball 43

Reading from the Book.

Finding Pictures, etc 46

Reading the Lesson 48

Dramatizing.

The Nursery Rhymes 50

Part II Phonics

Oral Drills (^1

Sound and Symbol H

Automatic Recognition of Words ^^

Phonics and Thought-Work 8i

Manual

for the

Child Classics Primer

PART I

THE NEW PATH

The children were possessed with the amusing illusion that having now grown to the proper size, they knew how to write, just as they had, when the strength came to them, been able to walk and to talk. — Dr. Maria Monte ssori.

To teach so that children will believe they can read merely because they are now big enough; so that they learn to read as naturally, easily and eagerly as they learn to talk — that is the psychological secret that many are seeking to discover.

Dr. Montessori seems to have found the secret for Italian children of kindergarten age.

McClure's Magazine says: ''For more than two years she taught the feeble-minded children from the asylums of Rome . . . Idiots sent to her from the public asylums she taught to read and write so that they could pass the same examinations that normal children of their age were expected to pass at the public schools 'The secret', she says, 'was simple. It was that the boys from the asylum had followed a (liferent path from that pursued in the public schools . . . While every one was admiring the progress of my idiots, I was meditating on the reasons that could keep happy and healthy common school children on so low a level that my unhappy pupils were able to stand beside them.' "

Many besides Dr. Montessori have been meditating to a good purpose, and the more who meditate and compare their thoughts and experiences, the sooner that psychological path will be found.

"There may be two straight roads to a town, One over, one under the hill."

Teachers have been taking the children over the hill and have found it a strength wasting climb; now they are seeking for the "level road," so that the energy wasted in learning to read may be spent in reading.

Children learn to talk because they want to talk. "Make them want to read and they will read Take them to a bock as to a person who has a story to tell," says Dr. S. H. Clark. He might have added: "Give them a primer that is a picture book and story book combined in which children talk to each other about things that all children like, and they will want to read."

Many Methods Better Than One

Every method has some especially good points which serve to supplement other methods. Indeed, it may be said that every method came into existence because of a recognized need. So every method is a step, more or less direct, toward that level road, that psychological path, which makes reading as easy as talking.

It is well, therefore, for each teacher to fashion her own method by interweaving as many methods as she can skilfully adapt to each other.

Dr. Montessori says: ''Discipline through Hberty . . . such a concept of active discipline is not easy either to comprehend or to attain; but certainly it contains a great educational principle."

So an ever-growing method of her own, made up of many methods by the individual teacher herself, may not be "easy either to comprehend or to attain, but certainly it contains a great educational principle."

It is not easy to attain the life-giving variety afforded by blending many methods, and yet avoid confusion, but life and "freedom" lead toward Dr. Montessori's auto-education.

The Child Classics Primer and First Reader are superlatively good as basal readers, because while excellent and complete in their own method, they yet lend themselves readily to a blending of methods, and so appeal both to those who are teaching their first term, and to those w^ho have taught for years.

The author says: "Every experienced teacher has and should have her own individual way by which she can teach better than any other. The following is but one w^ay by which reading may be taught." But she has so planned that one way that every experienced teacher may w^ell make it a part of her own individual method, and every young teacher may take it just as it is for her method until experience modifies it to fit even more perfectly her special needs.

The Child Classics Primer — so planned that the child reader is one w4th the children in the story; that his whole business is getting and giving thought; that he looks not only at the words but through them; and that he, through its 80 per cent, of phonetic words, is helped to become happily self reliant — this Primer Is a long step toward that "new path" In which Dr. Montessori assures us the children will largely teach themselves.

WHAT IS READING?

Is reading mere word calling or is it interpreting thought? Suit was brought in a city in Massachusetts to settle that question. There was a law that children should not be permitted to work in factories unless they could read. This especially affected the foreign population. The employers organized night schools; children were drilled till they could pronounce words glibly, then entered the factories. The superintendent of schools contended that the children could 7iot read because they got no more thought from calling the words on a page in a reader than they did from pronouncing the columns of "words on a page in a spelling book. The matter was taken to court for settlement.

Oddly enough mistakes in reading may show either that a child has not grasped the thought, or prove that he has done so. To illustrate: The sentence,''This is a worm, do not step on it/' was mechanically read by a ''word calling" boy, "This is a warm doughnut, step on it;" while a sentence in which a mother rat warned her young son, saying, "That is a trap, do not use it," was spiritedly rendered by a thought-getting child, "That is a trap, do not monkey with it!"

He certainly knew what the mother rat meant. And the correction given him should be very different from that accorded the careless boy who would contentedly step on a warm doughnut.

True reading then is grasping the thought even though the words may be miscalled.

"THOUGHT" AND "WORDS"

There are two phases of teaching reading which should be clearly recognized, and in a measure kept distinct. They are:

1. Mastering the words;

2. Interpreting the thought; or they may be called

1. Studying the lesson with the teacher;

2. Reading the lesson.

Thought is the end and words only the means. In practice, however, mastering words virtually comes first, because though the child may read sentences taught as wholes, he must know the individual words before he can read for himself new sentences made by rearranging words found in the sentences he has been taught.

This fact leads to two avoidable results: one, the children and unwary teachers mistake fluent calling of words for reading; the other, that pupils who are not fluent read perceptibly word b}' word. They see only one word at a time, pronounce it and then look at the next. This habit becomes fixed and even when they grasp the thought they read jerkily, saying:

"How do you do, John," in much the same tone in which they w^ould pronounce:

"Do , how^ , you , John , do."

To avoid these results, the child from his earliest lessons in the Primer class, should unconsciously feel that when he is getting and giving thought he is reading and when he is learning new words in order to find out what the sentence means, he is studying.

The difference is somewhat akin to that between "playing" a piece of music and "practising" that same piece in order to play it well.

A child never thinks w^hen he is practising an exercise on the piano that he is "playing a piece!"