Reading: How to Teach It

by Sarah Louise Arnold

Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

—William Shakespeare.

CHAPTER V.
LANGUAGE LESSONS AS A PREPARATION FOR READING LESSONS.

Two problems confront the teacher of little children in the ordinary school-room. Children coming from different homes, with various training and environment, do not always bring a common fund of knowledge. Unaccustomed to the strange surroundings and the new régime, they are not always free in telling what they know. The teacher needs to learn the “contents of their minds” (as the present phrase hath it), and this she cannot readily do unless the children converse freely and without self-consciousness. Talking lessons, or lessons whose object is purely to help them to free expression, so that they will reveal their experiences to the teacher, are very necessary at this stage. These lessons will have a further value if they help the children to new interests, and to new knowledge. They will also be more valuable if the teacher recognizes a definite purpose and forms a definite plan for the lesson.

Again, the simplest reading lesson develops the fact that, inasmuch as the children’s experiences have been varied, their corresponding fund of ideas is widely different. Any new lesson may present ideas entirely foreign to the experience of the children. The words which represent these ideas, therefore, will be unfamiliar. This state of affairs necessitates an act of teaching which should precede the act of reading. For example, a class of city children in the West attempt to read a story which deals with life by the sea. The sounding sea, the rolling waves, the whispering foam, the rugged rocks, the shining sands, the smooth pebbles, the brown seaweed, the white-winged ships, the brave sailors, are unknown quantities to these children—entirely foreign to their experience. Clearly, before they read this lesson, they must know something of the life and scenes which the lesson portrays. The teacher of children who live by the sea is not confronted by the same problem. Her children have played upon the beach, have gathered the many-colored pebbles, have built houses in the wet sand. Ships at sea are as familiar to them as are the clouds, or the birds; while many of them have played upon the decks of their fathers’ fishing-boats, and know the ropes and spars even as they know their own homes. These children have had an experience which fills the lesson with meaning. The inland children must be taught in the next best way. Since they cannot go to the sea, at least pictures of the sea may be brought to them. Shells and pebbles, sea-urchins, starfishes, and seaweeds will tell their story of the far-off beaches. Pictures of ships at sea, of rocks lashed by the waves in a storm, will help them to imagine the conditions which their lesson attempts to describe to them. But the wise teacher will make a connecting link, in some fashion, between the experience and interest of the child and the thought suggested by the story. Here, then, is the need of a language lesson which shall introduce or explain the reading lesson, preparing the child for the new thought, or recalling to his mind the almost forgotten experience.

The everyday experience in every city school-room will serve to reënforce this truth. Many a city child has never looked upon daisies and buttercups. Brooks and fields and trees are outside his little horizon. It is idle to have these children pronounce the words which stand for these objects unless the words call up pictures in their own minds, and this cannot be the case except as they have some experience with the real things. It is not impossible to bring the flowers and the birds and the trees within the experience of the children. No other work which we can ever do for them will tend more to their future happiness and growth; but, aside from that, no other work which we can do for them will contribute so generously to their growth in reading power. They cannot get the thought from the page unless the words stand for something at least akin to their own experience, and our first efforts must begin by occasioning the experience which is necessary to the interpretation of the printed page. As a means to good reading, then, language lessons are necessary for the purpose of developing ease of expression and freedom from self-consciousness, and leading to knowledge which will serve as a basis for the new thought contained in the lesson.

The subjects introduced in the earliest language lessons should be those with which children are ordinarily familiar. All country children are somewhat acquainted with the common animals: the rabbit, squirrel, cat, dog, cow, mouse, etc. They know something of the occupations of the people around them. They have watched the sunrise and sunset. They have seen the boughs of the trees waving in the wind. They have been awakened by the birds in the morning. They have cared for pet animals at home. Many city children have had something of this experience. All need to have it. In every lesson where these subjects are introduced, the teacher should be assured that the children already know something about them. A short conversation may suffice where the objects are already familiar; where they are strange, careful lessons should be arranged. The cat, rabbit, dog, squirrel, or mouse, can be brought to the school-room, cared for, observed, studied, discussed. These language lessons will not only give the children the knowledge necessary for understanding the lessons, but they will endow the subject with new interest, and add to the reading a sense of reality. Children who have been observing the squirrel will read with great zest the lessons which reaffirm what their eyes have seen, or answer the questions which they have asked, or tell some story which adds to the interest already evoked. The reading thus becomes an expression of the child’s actual experience or interest. It is no longer a something which he does simply because he is told. He sees at once the fruit of his labors. He reaches a goal which seems desirable from a child’s point of view. He recognizes the purpose and meaning of the story, and works to dig out the message which the sentences contain for him. Everything which serves to make the lesson real to the child’s experience, makes a permanent addition to his reading power.