From what has been said, it will be rightly judged that the poem affords a basis of several lessons, all of value in different directions. It may not be wise to make a detailed and careful study of every poem which is read or memorized by the children, but some teaching in the lines suggested is indispensable to intelligent reading on the part of the children. The phrases which are so familiar to us often suggest a very curious idea to the children. This interpretation is shown when they draw pictures to represent the scenes of the poem. In a certain school, the teacher read a story to the children containing the expression, “his mother gave him leave to go.” The child drew the mother in the act of presenting a leaf to the boy. “Fret-work,” said the boy who read “Sir Launfal” for the first time, “fret-work is work that makes you fret”; while the child who drew the picture of the hare and the tortoise represented a turtle and a boy with bushy hair. Reference has been made elsewhere to the kid on the roof of the house which was pictured as a little boy; and the writer remembers the pictures which were drawn by children in illustration of the above poem, representing the angels with webbed feet. These items are intended simply to suggest that the child’s crude notion is often very different from the meaning which the word or phrase conveys to us. We should be grateful for the frank question or the crude remark which betrays the child’s mistake, and should be careful to secure such confidence and freedom in our classes as will enable us to discover what the children are really thinking.
After reading and discussing the poem, the children may memorize it. At this juncture it is wise for the teacher to read it to the children again and again in order that they may get some notion of the proper reading. The children’s recitation will incline to adopt the virtues of the teacher’s reading; the faults will be imitated, also.
If, after such study and such memorizing, the words of the poem appear now and then in the children’s conversation or writing, let us rejoice; for this means not simply that new words have been added to the vocabulary, but that the child has a new conception of beauty of thought and speech.
We’re made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;