The following lesson-talk may be helpful for the teacher:
Read to yourself this little sentence: “Robert has a slate.” Is that a complete picture? You see that it is. Now read this sentence: “Robert has a slate and a pencil.” Here you note that Robert has two things, so the sentence is not complete when we come to the word “slate.” Although we have a clear picture, yet we have not the whole picture. How do we know this? In the first sentence there was a period after “slate,” but in the second sentence there was none, and because there wasn’t, we kept on reading and found there was another group of words giving us the picture of something else Robert had. Now this teaches us that if we want to read just as we speak, we must be careful to get not only one picture or two, but all the pictures in the sentence.
Let me show you how we often make mistakes in our reading because we don’t pay attention to what I have just shown you. Suppose we have this sentence: “I saw a cat, and a mouse, and a rat.” Now, some pupils are careless and they read, “I saw a cat,” just as if that were the whole sentence. Then they look a little further and see the next group, “and a mouse,” and they read that. Then they see the rest of the sentence, “and a rat,” and they read that. But we know that is not the way to read. We must first read the whole sentence silently until we get the picture in each group, and then we shall be sure to read the sentence just as one of us would speak it if he really saw the cat, the rat, and the mouse, at the same time.
Here is a very good example for you to study. Read it through slowly and carefully, and do not try to read it aloud until you see clearly the picture in each group. If you do as I ask, you will get a complete picture of the way in which the young soldier prepares to go out to battle:
But when the gray dawn stole into his tent,
He rose, and clad himself, and girt his sword,
And took his horseman’s cloak, and left his tent.
Can you not see the young warrior rising from his couch, dressing himself, girding on his sword, and so forth? If you can, then I am sure you will be able to make others see it as a complete picture, without breaking it up into many little pieces, just as we used to do in the first book. You see, he did not rise and stop; and then dress himself and stop; and gird his sword and stop; but one action followed the other, just as each car in a long, moving train, follows another. Each car is like a group of words, and the whole train is like the complete sentence.