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of the teacher is to follow the children in their conceptions and to help them to build their conceptions into a harmonious and complete story. The children are to furnish the content, the teacher is to help them give it form.

Supplementary Work

1. Let the little boy tell his story.

2. Let the fairy queen tell her story.

3. One or more of the stories may be dramatized.

XIV (113). Studying a Poem

Read to the children, with appropriate expression, The Chestnut Bur. Study the lesson with them in their book. In having parts of the poem read, as directed, work for free, dramatic expression. This is to be secured, not by demanding it, but by making the children feel free, by getting them "into the spirit" of the poem, by making them enjoy it, by making them want to express the different parts of it just as they think these should be expressed. Such freedom, enjoyment, and desire for discriminating expression is contagious; let the teacher furnish the source of it.

After this detailed study, have as many children read the poem as time allows, remembering that the purpose of every child must be to give a thoughtful, discriminating rendering, to express his conceptions as effectively as he can.

MEMORIZING A POEM

Supplementary Work

137

1. Let the children dramatize the story in the poem. They should be able to do this with little or no direct assistance. It will help them to recall the movements of the wind and the sunshine fairies as they dramatized them in the story, The Little White Flower (p. 91).

2. Children may tell the complete story from the poem. This should not be too difficult, after the detailed study and dramatization; the events are simple and given in natural order, which the child should follow. Be not satisfied with a dry and colorless statement of the facts; that is no worthy reproduction at all. There must be life, animation, conversation, concrete detail, even to the introduction of many original touches not inconsistent with the main facts.

XV (116). Memorizing a Poem

The poem, The Chestnut Bur, is worthy of memorizing, not only on account of its appeal to the child's fancy, but because of the simple, natural order in which it tells the story, an order which will serve as a model for the original story work which the pupils will soon be doing.

See that the pupils understand and follow the directions given in their book for memorizing the poem. After they have studied it in this way for

eight or ten minutes, test them. Probably some

I will be able to recite all three stanzas while others will scarcely have mastered the first. Commend the efforts of every one who has tried faithfully, and next time the results will be better; censure honest effort, and next time the results, if not the effort, will probably be less satisfactory.

Do not permit any mere word repetition of the poem. The pupil who cannot say it with appropriate expression has not really learned it.

Keep this, and all other poems that are memorized, fresh by occasional review.

CHAPTER SIX

ON account of the relation of this chapter to the preceding work it is especially suited either to the conclusion of the third or to the beginning of the fourth year's work; or, better still, it may serve both as the concluding chapter of the third and the beginning chapter of the fourth year of language study.

The chapter takes up nothing distinctly newunless the writing of conversation in dialogue form be so considered. Study the work given and compare it with that covered in the preceding chapters, and you will find that everything taken up previously all kinds of exercises and all marks and forms is here reviewed thoroughly and the power and acquisitions of the individual pupil well tested. Yet this is by no means a review chapter in the conventional meaning of that term. The reviews and tests are accomplished — and most effectively — not through repetition of exercises already given, but through new and varied material and exercises which will interest the children and elicit their best efforts not less than the work of any preceding chapter.

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Whenever this chapter is completed, whether at the end of the third or at the beginning of the fourth year, or at both these periods, compare the work from the beginning of the book and the purposes of it with the actual accomplishment of the children. If these questions can be answered in the affirmative, the study thus far has been a

success.

1. Have the children assimilated the ideas and the spirit of the stories - the fables and myths-made them an integral and usable part of their mental assets ?

2. Have they developed a considerable degree of control over their mental stores and mental powers so that they can reproduce and invent stories with some touch of originality and express them orally with effect?

3. Are they beginning to acquire the power of expressing their thought-reproduced and original — in writing?

4. Have they acquired some facility — through dramatizing, dialogue, impersonation, and conversation-in throwing themselves appreciatively into the position of different characters ?

5. Are they acquiring freedom, naturalness, spontaneity, and individuality of thought, feeling, and expression?

6. Do they know and understand how, when, and why to use, and are they forming the habit of using correctly the forms and words that have been especially taught?

(a) The capital to begin the first word of a sentence;

to begin the first and principal words of a title; to begin proper names; to begin every line of poetry; to begin quotations.

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