Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/397

Rh and subtract ones to ten. Each, day a passage of poetry was read at the opening and closing of the session; little songs were taught, gentle gymnastic exercises were introduced between the lessons, and the free-arm movement in making long straight lines was added to their lessons in writing. This work of the first week is given to show how the experiment was begun. The classes entering the second and third years were started with different sets of lessons, but substantially on the same lines.

Throughout the three years reading was taught as in the first week. When there were enough, sentences to make a four-page leaflet of print, they were printed and read in that form. The first transfer from script to print was made at the end of six weeks. The printed leaflets were distributed; the children merely glanced at them; as yet they were of less interest than the objects usually distributed. I said, "Look at the papers; see if there is anything on them that you have seen before." Soon one hand was raised, then another, and another. "Rosamond, what have you found?" "I think one of my sentences is here, but it don't look just like the one on the board." In less than ten minutes, by comparison of script and print, they read the whole leaflet, each pointing out "my sentences." After a few readings the children took the leaflets home, the sent(3nces were erased from the boards, and the same process repeated with the new matter that was accumulating. The reader may think there was great waste of time and effort, since the new vocabulary and the written and printed symbols must have been forgotten almost as soon as learned. I expected the children to forget much, and was surprised to find that they did not. One morning in March, a visitor who was looking over the accumulated leaflets asked to have them read. I told her they had been read when first printed only; but she urged the test, so I distributed them as they happened to come. The first leaflet fell to the youngest girl, and I think I was more amazed than our visitor when she read it without faltering. The visitor asked her, "What does palmately-veined mean, where you read 'The leaf of the cotton-plant is palmately-veined'?" The child replied, "I can show what it means better than I can tell it." "Show us, then, Marjorie," I said. The child drew on the board a fairly correct outline of a cotton-plant leaf, inserted its palmate veining, and turning to the visitor pointed to that veining. All the leaflets were read without help, nothing was forgotten, neither ideas nor words, as the visitor assured herself by questions.

No effort was made to use a special vocabulary, to repeat words, to avoid scientific terms; there was no drill in phonics or spelling; no attention was given to isolated words as words—a thought was the unit and basis of expression. In the science