The Italian Twins - Lucy Fitch Perkins

The Italian Twins can also be correlated with American government through the use by teachers of Webster’s Americanisation and Citizenship; pupils can read Bryant’s I Am an American. History can be correlated through the reading, either to the pupils or by them, of Tappan’s Story of the Roman People, Our European Ancestors, and American Hero Stories; also Moores’s Christopher Columbus and Stevenson’s Poems of American History. Italian art is well illustrated by several volumes in the Riverside Art Series, and in Hurll’s How to Show Pictures to Children.

For a background of Italian history teachers are referred to Davis’s History of Mediaeval and Modern Europe and to Sedgwick’s Short History of Italy. Certain aspects of Italian literature are introduced through Kuhns’s Great Poets of Italy and Crane’s Italian Popular Tales. Numerous books interpret Italian life and manners; for example, Hawthorne’s French and Italian Note-Books, Forman’s The Ideal Italian Tour, Potter’s A Little Pilgrimage in Italy, James’s Italian Hours, and Howells’s Italian Journeys.

Pupils will delight in reading “The Buried Treasure,” in the Riverside Fourth Reader; “An Italian Boy at School” (De Amicis), in Bolenius’s Sixth Reader (The Boys’ and Girls’ Readers); and the play, “Christopher Columbus,” in Stevenson’s Children’s Classics in Dramatic Form, Book III.

Earlier books in the Twins Series contain many other specific suggestions which teachers can readily adapt to the present story.