Reading: How to Teach It

by Sarah Louise Arnold

All children are interested in animal life, but few city children have more than a vague notion of the habits and characteristics of the animals of which they read. Not long ago, the writer chanced to hear a class of primary children reading about the hen. The exercise was hesitating, the reading dubious. Upon questioning it transpired that but three children in the class had ever seen a live hen, and in two of these cases the hen was “nailed up in a box in the market.” One child only had seen a hen walking about, and that was in “Tim Jones’s Alley.” Obviously the sentences which had seemed so luminous to the teacher were dark to the children.

Such experiences are not confined to city children. Wide experience has discovered many a country child whose eyes have never been truly opened to the life about him. It is safe to assume that any class of little children will profit by the lesson which increases their interest in the bird world, and opens their eyes to see new beauties, their minds to receive new pictures, and which incidentally explains the pages that otherwise are meaningless.

For such preliminary study, the best beginning is the observation of some caged bird which can be kept within reach for awhile. A canary, a parrot, a dove, a hen, a duck will behave well in the school-room, may be cared for by the pupils, and observed for several days, and will serve as a centre from which new investigation may radiate, or a type to which all new bird knowledge may be referred. The canary or parrot will be brought in its own house. For the others a dwelling-place may be extemporized. A box frame may be built, open on all sides, and covered with coarse wire netting or netted fencing; or one side may be removed from a wooden box of suitable size, and netting be substituted for it. The children should be able to watch the bird as it eats, drinks, walks, or flies about, and should at first be allowed to observe without the restriction of question or recitation.

The conversation of the pupils, their exclamations and questions, will reveal the best line of approach to the subject. It will be found that their chief interest centres in the actions of the bird. “See him eat! How fast he turns the seed. See the shells fly! How he spatters the water! Oh, he’s washing himself!” Such are the free comments of the children. Let these determine the first lesson.

“You have been watching the canary. What have you seen him do? What can he do that you can do? What can he do that you cannot do?”

These questions cannot be answered without actual knowledge. If the replies are written upon the board, it will be discovered that the children have added definitely to their store of knowledge, and likewise to their vocabulary.

Another conversation may compare the cat and the canary, the cow and the canary, or (a very different exercise) may note the resemblances and differences between the canary and other birds with which the children are somewhat familiar. This comparison leads to observation of the structure, to naming and describing the parts of the canary.

“The canary can fly because he has wings. We have no wings, but we have arms. The cat has no wings, but she has two forelegs.” So the comparison proceeds to head, eyes, bill, feet, until the children are able to describe the bird in clear and appropriate language.

Another talk compares the habits of the bird with those of the cat or dog, and leads to descriptions of the nests, the eggs, the home habits of the bird, with the rearing of the young. The lessons prepare for the reading, to be sure, but this value is incidental only, as compared with the widened interest and growing power of the children in thinking, seeing, and saying.

It would be interesting to keep a record of the words used, or needed, by the children in such lessons, to collate them afterward, and to discover what proportion of the list of words is included in the ordinary stock vocabulary of elementary readers. Such a study would reveal to any intelligent teacher the close relation between experience and reading, and would fully justify the plan of work outlined in these pages.