E XPERIMENTAL S ECTION: R EADING A LOUD

Although we lay all possible stress on interpretative reading, we nevertheless put into the hands of the child a little reading book which he can go over by himself first in a low voice, and then, when he has grasped the meaning, aloud, provided he can express himself clearly and easily.

The simplicity of these texts occasions surprise when one observes how completely and enthusiastically absorbed in them the children become. They find them so delightful that the books get literally worn out with the reading and rereading to which they are subjected. Sometimes a book is read from beginning to end. Again the child opens it by chance and reads the page he happens on. Some children like to read the whole book over and over. Others prefer to read some particular page a great many times. One frequently sees these tiny things suddenly rise with great decision and read aloud one of the pages which has been so seriously examined.

The little book was composed very carefully on the basis of rigid experimentation. As the book is opened only one page of print appears, the tergo of the right hand page being always blank. Nor does the text always cover the entire page. The spaces above and below the print are decorated with designs.

Page 1. My school is the "Children's House."

Page 2. In the "Children's House" there are ever so many little chairs and tables for us. Page 3. There are also some pretty cabinets. Each child has his own drawer.

Page 4. There are green plants and beautiful bouquets of flowers everywhere about the rooms in our school.

Page 5. I often stop to look at the pictures which are hanging on the walls.

Page 6. We are busy all the time. We wash our faces and hands. We keep everything where it belongs. We dust the furniture. We study and try to learn all we can.

Page 7. Can you guess how we learned to dress ourselves? We kept our fingers busy working on the canvas frames, lacing and unlacing, fastening and unfastening the hooks and eyes, buttoning and unbuttoning, tying and untying knots.

Page 8. Then are ten blocks for this tower, all of different sizes. First I spread them around on this carpet. It is great fun to put them together again, taking one after the other and choosing the largest each time.

Page 9. I use the tower too in a balancing game. Just try to carry the tower around the room without letting it fall to pieces! Sometimes I succeed and then again I sometimes fail.

Page 10. I like the long rods, too! I must put the rods near each other according to their length. I must be careful to place the blue sections near the blue ones and the red ones near the red. Thus, I build some pretty stairs with red and blue steps.

Page 11. But to get a real stair case I use the brown prisms. These prisms are of different size, and I get some fine stairs with ten steps.

Page 12. I have also some solid insets of wood into which I fit little cylinders of different

dimensions. They differ in length and breadth. The game is to put these cylinders in their places after looking at them and touching them carefully.

Page 13. We often make mistakes in working with the insets. When we put a cylinder where it doesn't belong, we find that at the end of the game we have one cylinder left over and it won't fit in anywhere. Then the exercise becomes very exciting. We look at the inset carefully; we find the mistake and begin all over again. The most skilful pupils work the insets with their eyes closed.

Page 14. These colors are called: red, black, green, yellow, blue, brown, pink and violet. Page 15. I amuse myself by picking out and pulling together pieces of the same color from the

collection spread out over my table. I get thus a long strip of different colors.

Page 16. We learn to arrange sixty-four different colors by graduations. We get eight beautiful blends of colors, each formed by eight tints of different tones. When we become skilful we can make a pretty rug with blending strips.

Page 17. We also have two little chests full of pieces of cloth. The cloths are of all kinds from the roughest and hardest to the smoothest and softest: canvas, cotton, linen, wool, flannel, velvet, etc. If we keep our hands clean, we can learn to recognize all sorts of things with the tips of our fingers!

Page 18. A child is blindfolded. He mixes the pieces of cloth with his little hands. He feels about among the pieces of cloth. At last he smiles and holds up his hands with two pieces of cloth, both alike. Though he could not see, the child has found out, just by using his fingers, that the two pieces were of the same cloth.

have just enough room for them. I run two fingers, the fore-finger and the middle-finger, around the edge of the tablet, and then around the edge of the frames. Next I fit the tablet into its proper place. After a little practise I can put the six tablets in their places even with my eyes blindfolded.

Page 20. With the plane insets I have learned to recognize many figures: the square, the circle, the rectangle, the ellipse, the triangle, the oval, the pentagon, the hexagon, the heptagon, the octagon, the enneagon, the decagon. I learned all these hard names very easily because the insets are so amusing!

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Reading with the object of interpretation is conducted as in the first experiments of the "Children's House," with cards. From the graduated series we have prepared the child selects a card. He reads it mentally and then executes the action indicated on the card. Our later experiments became very interesting when they were based upon a more rigorous method. When we gave a card describing two actions to a child of five years, he would execute only one of the actions. Take the following for example:

—She leaned over the back of a chair.

—She covered her face with her hands and wept.

The child would act out either the first sentence (She leaned over the back of the chair) or the second (She covered her face with, her hands and wept). In spite of the fact that this child seemed extraordinarily eager to get the cards into his hands and to interpret them, those containing two sentences always aroused in him less enthusiasm than those containing a single sentence or indicating a single action (for instance, The boy ran away as fast as he could). In this latter case the enthusiasm of the little ones, their care in interpreting the action vividly, their eagerness to repeat it, their flushed faces and shining eyes, told us that at last we had the reading adapted to their psychology.

Our first series of readings accordingly is entirely "tested" or experimental. It is made up of simple sentences something like those analyzed in the lessons on grammar (Verb to Pronoun).

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