Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/76

64 help powerfully in securing that equipment of knowledge for which schools are established. The reading lesson I have referred to was given to the lowest class, with one little boy in it not yet five, which the master had allowed to enter.

The reader will assent, I have no doubt, when I say that learning to read makes a severe demand upon the attention, and there is perhaps no other subject, when we consider the way it is usually taught, that tires the pupil so quickly, simply because we do not provide for the employment of the energy that must be discharged into other channels. The act of recognizing and learning new words uses only a small part of the energy which the various groups of nerve cells are constantly accumulating in the healthy and growing child. Now this gentle, sunny German schoolmaster, who was every whit a man, focused the attention of his little class upon the words he wished that day to teach them, and added interest and delight to the exercise because he made other demands than those upon the eye and the voice and the ear. There were five words in the lesson, and the lesson lasted just five minutes, after which the little class went to a table in another part of the room and took up number work. The words of the reading lesson were Hut, Rad, Fisch, Topf, Sichel. The letters were printed on pieces of cardboard about two inches and a half square, and these were placed in the shallow trough of the black-board in the order demanded by the words. Each pupil when called upon made a vigorous striking gesture as he pointed to each letter, giving at the same time the sound of the letter. When he had sounded each letter of the word in this manner he made another gesture, this time from left to right as if to blend all the sounds, pronouncing the word as he made the gesture. Then the little group in concert spelled and pronounced the word in the same fashion. The next pupil went through the same exercise with the second word, and so on for each pupil. Sometimes the master would tip the letters of a word over on to the floor and direct one of the pupils to pick them up and put them back in proper order; or he would take the letter cards, mix them up, and direct a pupil to put them back in the trough in their proper order.

In the Heusinger School, lately organized to give application to these principles, this plan of letting children point singly and then together to the letters of words written on the board has been used as one way of providing motor activity while teaching beginners to read. But variety is necessary, and as another way of securing this the pupil, when he has read his sentence, goes to the blackboard and writes it, then to the table, picks out the printed or script letters according as he has been directed, and forms on a tablet these letters into the sentence, and then takes