Section V Should Be Used in Each of These Grades.

Nature prose should appeal more and more to children as they advance from the fourth to the eighth grade. Many pupils in the fourth grade will enjoy reading for themselves books by Burgess and Paine, while fifth- and sixth-grade pupils will get much pleasure from the simpler books by Sharp, Seton, Long, Miller, and Roberts. In the intermediate grades, the teacher may read such stories as "Wild Life in the Farm Yard," "The Vendetta," "Pasha," "Moufflou," and "Bird Habits."

Stories of various other kinds may be read by the teacher in the intermediate grades. "Goody Two-Shoes" and "Waste Not, Want Not," are suitable for the fourth grade. The biographies "How Columbus Got His Ships" and "Boyhood of Washington" are excellent in the fifth or sixth grade as an introduction to history study, and the romance "Robin Hood and the Merry Little Old Woman" may be used appropriately in any of these grades, especially if it is made to supplement a discussion of the Norman conquest.

Most of the poems up to about No. 342, and a few beyond that, are within the range of the work for these grades.

Seventh and eighth grades. Although pupils in the seventh and eighth grades may be expected to read simple narrative readily, the teacher should read to the pupils frequently. It cannot be too much emphasized that reading aloud to children is the surest way of developing an appreciation of the best in literature. In poetry especially this is a somewhat critical time, as the pupil is passing from the simpler and more concrete verse to that which has a more prominent thought content. The persuasion of the reading voice smooths over many obstacles here. Outside the field of poetry, the teacher's work in these grades is mainly one of guidance and direction in getting the children and the right books in contact. Children at this period are likely to be omnivorous readers, ready for any book that comes their way, and the job of keeping them supplied with titles of enough available good books for their needs is indeed one to tax all a teacher's knowledge and experience.

The demand for highly sensational stories on the part of pupils in the upper grades is so insistent that it constitutes a special problem for the teacher. It is a perfectly natural demand, and no wise teacher will attempt to stifle it. Such an attempt would almost certainly result in a more or less surreptitious reading of a mass of unwholesome books which have come to be known as "dime novels." Instead of trying to thwart this desire for the thrilling story the teacher should be ready to recommend books which have all the attractive adventure features of the "dime novel," and which have in addition sound artistic and ethical qualities. While many such books are mentioned in the bibliographies in the latter part of this text, it has seemed well to bring together here a short list of those which librarians over the country have found particularly fitted to serve as substitutes for the dime novel.

Alden, W. L., The Moral Pirate.

Altsheler, Joseph A., The Young Trailers. Horsemen of the Plains.

Barbour, Ralph H., The Crimson Sweater.

Bennett, John, The Treasure of Peyre Gaillard.

Burton, Charles P., The Boys of Bob's Hill.

Carruth, Hayden, Track's End.

Cody, William F., Adventures of Buffalo Bill.

Drysdale, William, The Fast Mail.

Grinnell, George Bird, Jack among the Indians. Jack, the Young Ranchman.

Hunting, Henry G., The Cave of the Bottomless Pool.

Janvier, Thomas A., The Aztec Treasure House.

Kaler, James Otis, Toby Tyler, or Ten Weeks with a Circus.

London, Jack, The Call of the Wild.

Malone, Captain P. B., Winning His Way to West Point.

Masefield, John, Jim Davis.

Mason, Alfred B., Tom Strong, Washington's Scout.

Matthews, Brander, Tom Paulding.

Moffett, Cleveland, Careers of Danger and Daring.

Munroe, Kirk, Cab and Caboose. Derrick Sterling.

O'Higgins, Harvey J., The Smoke Eaters.

Quirk, Leslie W., The Boy Scouts of the Black Eagle Patrol.

Sabin, Edwin L., Bar B Boys.

Schultz, James Willard, With the Indians in the Rockies.

Stevenson, Burton E., The Young Train Despatcher.

Stevenson, Robert Louis, Treasure Island.

Stoddard, William O., Two Arrows. Talking Leaves.

Trowbridge, John T., Cudjo's Cave. The Young Surveyor.

Verne, Jules, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea.

Wallace, Dillon, Wilderness Castaways.

White, Stewart Edward, The Magic Forest.