The teacher in the ungraded school is particularly fortunate in opportunities for this kind of work, because she can correlate it with other subjects in ways that workers in schools using the departmental system cannot do. One country teacher had her eighth-grade history class give a pageant portraying the French exploration in the Mississippi Valley. The class devoted a term to the preparation; the subject was made the nucleus of their reading, language, history, and manual work, and the results were most gratifying. Boys who never had written a readable paper did some astonishingly good work in composition because of their interest in the play and their desire to contribute to it, and the standard of class scholarship was raised, to say nothing of the joy the children derived from it.
Many other historical subjects are equally rich in possibilities. The Spanish exploration in Florida, the Dutch in New York, the Spanish settlement of California, the framing and adoption of the Declaration of Independence, John Smith and Pocahontas, Ponce de Leon seeking the fountain of youth, the story of Columbus, and many similar themes afford good opportunities for class play-making and correlation of school subjects.
Sometimes a picture will suggest an entire scene in a dramatization, or even an entire play; the following are especially good for this purpose:
Bacon: The Burial of Miles Standish.
Balaca: Departure of Columbus from Palos.
Boughton: Pilgrims Going to Church; Pilgrim Exiles; The Return of the Mayflower; Priscilla.
Kaulbach: The Pied Piper of Hamelin.
Piloty: Columbus on the Deck of the Santa Maria.
Van der Lyn: The Landing of Columbus.