The teacher who realizes the value of motor activity will be glad to find
early in this book such words and phrases as _run_, _march_, _jump_,
_sing_, _whistle_, _bounce the ball_, _toss the ball_, etc. She will know
how to utilize these in “action sentences” developed in the blackboard
lessons that usually precede reading from the book.
The vocabulary consists of 274 words, listed on pages 123 to 126, with
the number of the page on which each first occurs. They are printed in
clear type that they may be used at will for word drills.
Children vary much in their power to learn and apply phonic facts.
With some, slowness to perceive these facts is due to lack of ear
discrimination. With some, lack of power to apply the facts is due to
lack of reasoning power. The child who writes, “I like the fresh _ear_,”
and justifies her spelling by the analogies _bear_, _tear_, _wear_,
hence, _ear_, has too much reasoning power for the language she inherits.
It is expected that most teachers will teach this book by the “story”
method, supplemented by the “word and sentence” method, with recourse,
where needful, to the “phonic” method. The various combinations of any or
all of these methods, and the various devices employed will depend upon
the training, the experience, and the pedagogic faith of each teacher.
The book can be thus taught throughout without the use of phonics.
It is expected that the wise teacher will watch her class, and present
to the whole class, to the class by groups, or to individual children,
the phonic facts, when she thinks they can be best assimilated. The
teacher who presents them to all her children just as and when they occur
in the book, will do much less harm than in handling any of the purely
phonic readers, since the phonics are so easily graded, so successfully
divorced from any injurious modification of the sense of the text, and
so skillfully associated with melody and rhythm that they will never, as
presented, produce the baleful effect of correlating the sight and sound
and motor centers, with the intellect left out, under the name of reading.
The sounds of the single consonants, of the digraphs, _ch_, _sh_, _th_,
_wh_, _wr_, and _kn_, that are treated as single letters, and the short
sounds of the vowels are learned first as the initial letters of certain
words that are well known as wholes. For instance, _run_ has already
become thoroughly known as a word when the child finds it at the bottom
of page 3 printed thus: