“No doubt it was a pleasant lesson; but, think of all the pasting and cutting!”
“Yes, that is troublesome. I wish some publisher would provide us with what we want—nursery rhymes, in good bold type, with boxes of loose words to match—a separate box, or division, for each page, so that the child may not be confused by having too many words to hunt amongst. The point is that he should see, and look at, the new word many times, so that its shape becomes impressed on his brain.”
“I see; but he is only able to read ‘Cock Robin’; he has no general power of reading.”
“On the contrary, he will read those twelve words wherever he meets with them. Suppose he learns ten words a day, in half a year he will have at least six hundred words; he will know how to read a little.”
“Excellent, supposing your children remember all they learn. At the end of a week, mine would remember ‘Cock Robin,’ perhaps, but the rest would be gone!”
“Oh, but we keep what we get! When we have mastered the words of the second verse, Bob runs through the first in the book, naming words here and there as I point to them. It takes less than a minute, and the ground is secured.”
“The first lesson must have been long?”
“I’m sorry to say it lasted half an hour. The child’s interest tempted me to do more than I should.”
“It all sounds very attractive—a sort of game—but I cannot be satisfied that a child should learn to read without knowing the powers of the letters. You constantly see a child spell a word over to himself, and then pronounce it; the more so, if he has been carefully taught the sounds of the letters—not merely their names.”
“Naturally; for though many of our English words are each a law unto itself, others offer a key to a whole group, as arrow gives us sp arrow, m arrow, h arrow; but we have alternate days—one for reading, the other for word-building—and that is one way to secure variety, and, so, the joyous interest which is the real secret of success.”