Plan Of Work For The Progressive Road To Reading PDF Download

How often, in the far-away, golden days of childhood, have you said, "Tell me a story, please!" As often, doubtless, as there was a reasonable chance of your request being granted. For the love of stories is one of the universal instincts of human nature; the art of story-telling-the gift of spoken narrative-goes back to the "dawn of civilization. From the minstrel who recounted the glorious deeds of warriors and stirred the hearts of his hearers to greater courage, to the omnipresent fiction of to-day, the influence of the story-telling art has steadily increased. Strange, isn't it, that such a power should not have been utilized long ago as a means of teaching reading? Millions of children have learned to read by slow, dull and irksome ways while this delightful and thoroughly practical method was simply awaiting someone wise enough to see its possibilities. The authors of these books, Miss Georgine Burchill, Dr. Edgar Dubs Shimer and Dr. William L. Ettinger, have made "The Progressive Road to Reading" a perfect expression of the story-telling method. And they have united this method with a remarkably simple yet definite and coherent phonetic plan. With a story-telling method the child learns to read by means of stories: he does not have to struggle with a long and stupid drill on meaningless phrases and disconnected sentences before he comes to the fascination of a real story. From the very first lesson in "The Progressive Road to Reading" the story form lays its hold upon the child's imagination. He is at once animated by that most effective of all stimuli-interest. Then, little by little, there dawns upon him the charm of getting an interesting story from the printed page and he feels that the thing he most wants to do is to learn to read. Reading becomes to him a living joy instead of a hard, bewildering task. -Teachers Magazine for Primary Grades, Vol. 35