chase is harmless enough; but if encouraged by teacher or parent, it will often work harm to the child. The safe attitude is one of seeming indifference to linguistic prowess. The glib child is often the parrot child, whose words have shallow content, and run away with him. "The most hopelessly dull," are the scatterbrained ones

as Miss Wiltse says,

who catch and toss words, and facts even, from tongue-tips without turning them over in their own minds." It is the child of reserved, meditative habit, who deliberates before he speaks, and grips the matter of his thought, that is the more hopeful type.

CHAPTER IV

THE KINDERGARTEN (continued) AND THE PRIMARY GRADES

PASSING now to details, the leading points to be treated of will be the standards, habits, and devices of the teacher; the language of the child, and the methods of correction; memorizing and declamation; story-telling and the selection of stories.

As the child in the Kindergarten (and sometimes in the First Primary Grade) does not read or use books, the teacher is his text, his sole model and resource. Her vocabulary, idioms, constructions, ways of enunciation, the very tones of her voice, tend to become his without the corrective or complementary influence of books. She ought therefore to be especially careful to use correct, appropriate, and effective speech. We need not insist that it shall be correct speech; but there is some reason for insisting that it shall be appropriate. This does not mean that it shall be monosyllabic; but that it shall be ideal child's speech, tending always toward the graphic, concrete, imaginative. Let it be suggestive, as primitive speech is, by trope and figure. The child is a symbolist in language as in other things. His world is a picture-world; and,

to reach him, language must start pictures, just as Homer's epithets start the pictures of his gods and heroes: Apollo the Far-darter, fleet-footed Achilles, ox-eyed Hera, horse-taming Diomedes, Hector of the glancing helm.

Indeed, the Kindergarten and the Primary teacher have much to gain from Homer, as from the Norse epics and the literature of the early world generally, not only in the way of substance and story, but in the noble simplicity of their language, the language of the childhood of the world. For the childhood of to-day, also, things must be sketched in their large and salient features. It is not necessary to reduce expression to the colloquial level. The language may be here, as it should be throughout the course, a little in advance of the child's resources, and (in the more formal work, like story-telling) should be lifted by a certain dignity above the plane of ordinary talk when the subject calls for it, as would be the case e.g. in many of the myths. This practice will help to enlarge the child's vocabulary, will give a touch of novelty and importance to the work, and will gradually accustom him to literary English.

As story-teller, wherein her greatest strength must lie, the teacher ought to aim to embody certain characteristic virtues of the classic story-teller, the saga

man, rhapsodist, dervish, minstrel. Of course the story must be skilfully and impressively put together, achiev

CHAPTER IV

THE KINDERGARTEN (continued) AND THE PRIMARY GRADES

PASSING now to details, the leading points to be treated of will be the standards, habits, and devices of the teacher; the language of the child, and the methods of correction; memorizing and declamation; story-telling and the selection of stories.

As the child in the Kindergarten (and sometimes in the First Primary Grade) does not read or use books, the teacher is his text, his sole model and resource. Her vocabulary, idioms, constructions, ways of enunciation, the very tones of her voice, tend to become his without the corrective or complementary influence of books. She ought therefore to be especially careful to use correct, appropriate, and effective speech. We need not insist that it shall be correct speech; but there is some reason for insisting that it shall be appropriate. This does not mean that it shall be monosyllabic; but that it shall be ideal child's speech, tending always toward the graphic, concrete, imaginative. Let it be suggestive, as primitive speech is, by trope and figure. The child is a symbolist in language as in other things. His world is a picture-world; and,

to reach him, language must start pictures, just as Homer's epithets start the pictures of his gods and heroes: Apollo the Far-darter, fleet-footed Achilles, ox-eyed Hera, horse-taming Diomedes, Hector of the glancing helm.

Indeed, the Kindergarten and the Primary teacher have much to gain from Homer, as from the Norse epics and the literature of the early world generally, not only in the way of substance and story, but in the noble simplicity of their language, the language of the childhood of the world. For the childhood of to-day, also, things must be sketched in their large and salient features. It is not necessary to reduce expression to the colloquial level. The language may be here, as it should be throughout the course, a little in advance of the child's resources, and (in the more formal work, like story-telling) should be lifted by a certain dignity above the plane of ordinary talk when the subject calls for it, as would be the case e.g. in many of the myths. This practice will help to enlarge the child's vocabulary, will give a touch of novelty and importance to the work, and will gradually accustom him to literary English.

As story-teller, wherein her greatest strength must lie, the teacher ought to aim to embody certain characteristic virtues of the classic story-teller, the sagaman, rhapsodist, dervish, minstrel. Of course the story must be skilfully and impressively put together, achiev