Reading: How to Teach It

by Sarah Louise Arnold

From her blue, bright eyes.”

When, at close of day, the child kneels to pray beside her snow-white cot, an angel pauses to hear, and asks what good child prays so lovingly beside her bed. The blackbird answers from the orchard croft, “Bell, dear Bell!” “Whom God’s creatures love, God doth bless with angels’ care,” the angel murmured. “Child, thy bed shall be folded safe from harm. Love, deep and kind, shall watch around, and leave good gifts behind, little Bell, for thee.”

Even the little children sense the meaning of the poem. They have already learned that love wins love and makes friends, and they feel it to be both natural and just that the loving little Bell shall be shielded from all harm, and sheltered by loving thought. The elder children may be reminded of Sidney Lanier’s poem, “How Love Sought for Hell,” failing to find it because wherever his presence came there were kindness and light. The little ones are reminded that the mirror gives back smile for smile, and frown for frown. It is hardly necessary to “point the moral and adorn the tale.” The poet has repeated in the self-same words the lines which show how the child grew in sweetness as she played so lovingly with her woodland friends. For many classes it would be enough to talk of the poem until the children were possessed of this thought, or rather this feeling, and then leave it to do its own work. In this case, however, the poem serves as a text for the lesson, and we shall consider other phases.

The Pictures in the Poem.

The poem takes us at once to the woods where the blackbird pipes on the beechwood spray. We see the rocks, the dell, the glade, the trees, the hazel shade, and are made acquainted with the blackbird and the squirrel. Plainly, the setting of the poem is clearest to those children who themselves have played in the woods; who have heard the blackbird sing, and have seen the squirrel leap from bough to bough. The beechwood spray, the hazel shade, the dell, the glade, the fern, are already familiar to such children, and need no lesson to introduce them. But if the tenement house, the narrow alley, the brick walls, and the noisy street have been the familiar surroundings of the children, and if the country seems as far away to them as Paradise, the poem is written in a foreign tongue. With such children, other lessons are necessary before any such selection is read or memorized. These lessons may not be given at the time of the reading—far better not; but they should precede the reading in the teacher’s plan, and the young reader should enter upon this lesson equipped with some knowledge of the bird, the squirrel, and the woods. In another chapter, something has been said of the necessity of such teaching, and of the way in which such lessons may be conducted. The suggestion is made here simply to emphasize this truth: that observation of nature is essential to the interpretation of literature.

Study of the Vocabulary of the Poem.

Although the pupils may be prepared by their out-of-door experience to understand the poem, they will, nevertheless, be met by a new difficulty in the reading. The language of literature differs from that to which they have been accustomed in conversation. The tendency of our school readers and children’s books is often to remove such difficulties from the path of the children. The lessons are expressed in words already familiar to the children, and in colloquial forms. While this practice renders the first lessons in reading easy, it makes the entrance to literature difficult. Many expressions are entirely foreign to the child’s ear, and therefore unintelligible, even when the story is attractive. The poem which we are using for illustration contains many words and phrases which the children have not met in their ordinary reading. These must be explained and their meaning made familiar to the children. “‘What’s your name?’ quoth he”; “stop, and straight unfold”; “showery curls of gold”; “gleaming golden locks”; “bonny bird”; “blackbird piped”; “dell”; “glade”; “hazel shade”; “void of fear”; “hies”; “golden woodlights”; “adown the tree”; “playmates twain”; “an angel shape”; “crooned the blackbird in the orchard croft,” are some of these.

It may not be necessary nor wise in most classes to study all these expressions minutely, but they should become plain to the children so that they may plainly speak the message of the poem, and present no difficulty if met elsewhere. So with the figurative expressions: “The bird did pour his full heart out freely”; “the sweetness did shine forth in happy overflow”; “thy bed shall be folded safe from harm”; “stop, and straight unfold.”

There is no reason why the young readers should not come to realize the picture in these figurative expressions, to compare their several words with the figure which the poet has used, and to begin to sense the difference between the plain, straightforward speech and the pictured verses of the poet. Such study, however simple, will help the children to some appreciation of the beauty of expression, which is one charm of literature.