1. Reading aloud for development of literary taste. This is the most important educational use of ballads. The teacher should read them aloud to the class, giving them all their native swing and quick pulsation. The minstrels, who composed them, often accented words to suit the length of their lines; so if the reader will lend her voice to the rhythm of the verse, the accents will fall where they belong. Such words as country, harper, singer, damsel, lady, and battle should sometimes be accented on the last syllable, as countrý, singér, harpér, ladý.
2. Memorizing and reciting. Boys and girls enjoy learning ballads by heart. They do so with astonishing ease. The teacher may assign one ballad to the whole class; or she may divide the class into sections and assign a ballad to each section. This should be done at least two or three weeks before the period for recitation. The teacher may then call on one or more of the pupils to recite.
3. Story-telling from the ballads. The teacher may read aloud a ballad. She should read it two or three times to the class. Then the pupils may retell it in story form either orally or in writing.
4. Dramatization. Ballads are so dramatic and simple in their movement that they may be easily acted in the schoolroom with or without improvised scenery and costumes. The teacher or pupil may read aloud the ballad, while some of the boys and girls act it out in dumb show; or, better yet, the actors may recite the lines that belong to their parts, and the teacher may read aloud the descriptive parts only. Whenever a refrain occurs, as in “The Stormy Winds Do Blow,” the whole class may join in reciting it.
5. Writing from memory. The teacher may assign a ballad to the class to learn by heart; and then she may have the class write it out from memory following closely the spelling, punctuation, and dialect of the text.
6. Original ballad-writing. Young people are natural ballad-makers. At the end of the year, after memorizing and reciting ballads and listening to them read aloud, the pupils will be so saturated with ballad-spirit and meter, that ballad-writing will be a second nature. The teacher may then tell, very briefly but interestingly, the plot of a ballad, and let the pupils put it into original verses, giving them a week or two in which to do so. After this exercise the teacher may assign a local legend or story for practice in original ballad-writing.
The Programme that is given here is merely suggestive. All the ballads in the book are good to read aloud, and most of them may be dramatized or memorized. The course presented below shows a teacher how she may, by progressive steps, develop her pupils’ taste for ballad-literature, and prepare them to appreciate more mature forms of narrative poetry, such as metrical romances and epics.