Here is a little doll book craft about a Japanese doll's adventures. Young visitors here may ask their teacher, guardian, or parent to print it out, fold the pages in half, glue together the blank pages and staple or tie miniature book together. Enjoy! Read the Terms of Use.
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This is just one way to assemble mini-books. I will share more solutions in a future post.
Don't forget to drag the png. or jpg into a Word Document and enlarge the image
as much as possible before printing it folks. If you have a question
about this coloring page, just type into the comment box located
directly below this post and I'll try to get back to you as soon as I
can.
In children's reading ballads and other narrative poems will supply stories, and will appeal to the emotional side of a child's nature. Poems of nature will satisfy the girl or boy who loves outdoor beauty, but who, perhaps, has never cared for poetry. I have seldom known a listener, however youthful, who did not thrill in response to Lanier's "Hymns of the Marshes," especially if they were read so as to bring out the exquisite melody which the musician-poet put into them. The large group of miscellaneous lyrics will appeal to the boy's or girl's curiosity about the human heart, whose stirrings he or she is beginning dimly to feel. The love-lyrics, as well as the love parts in the other types of poetry, will do something toward satisfying the girl's desire to know more about the great passion of love which vaguely enfolds her future. There should not be separate reading courses for boys and girls, for they should not be encouraged to develop entirely apart from each other. While it is true, as I have said, that girls like to read about love and boys about battles, it is also true that each should cultivate the tastes of the other. Boys and girls are alike human beings; life will bring love to men as well as to women, and battles to be fought by women as well as by men. It is well that they should both gain high ideals of both the loving and the striving of the life upon which they are entering, side by side.
The children who are thus trained and encouraged into a habit of reading poetry, and who thus become accustomed to appreciating the true meanings and finer values of life, will meet the world with an armor which is unassailable. However many of the external things of life are denied them, or taken from them; whatever disappointments and sorrows come, these one-time children will have that within their heads and hearts which can console them for material losses, and sustain them in sorrows. For, in the long run, it is what we have inside our heads and hearts that matters, -- both to ourselves and to the world as we touch it. If we learn, all our lives, from the great interpreters of life, the poets, the seers, we too shall see and understand.
The second, the subjective need of the child, is that one which "The Lady of the Lake" met in the instance I mentioned before, in addition to its meeting his first need for a story. It made him feel how much he liked his camp on the lake, -- which means that it satisfied his youthful egotistic need to find his own feelings, inner experiences, thoughts, actually expressed. The boy likes to hear about prowess in battle, heroism, strength, chivalry, -- all the manly virtues, admirations, ideals, which are beginning to dawn in his boy's consciousness. The girl likes to hear about romance, love, even death. They both, if they are nature lovers, like poetic interpretations of nature. Now poetry -- lyric poetry especially -- is the record and expression of just these things. And the better the expression, the better for the boy or girl. Their own conceptions of the sentiments they feel are vague and rudimentary; the things they read express those sentiments fully, and their vague feelings spring, full-armed, into life. How vitally important is it, then, that what they read shall be the highest, the truest expression of the highest and truest feeling! Isn't it better for a girl to get her ideas of romance and of love from "Evelyn Hope," from "Sonnets from the Portuguese," from Tennyson, Shakespeare, and Keats, than from cheap sentimental novels? I do not believe that the reading of good love-poetry will hurt a girl in the least. She will read something about love, -- why not let her read the best, in both fiction and poetry?
This brings us to the second answer to our question. The other great reason why boys and girls do not care for poetry is because it does not obviously meet their needs, which are of two kinds: objective and subjective. Their objective need is for stories, -- stories -- stories. Of course they like stories. Why shouldn't they? Stories tell about life, the great adventure which looms, wonderful, mysterious, ahead of them. Boys want stories of action, because for untold generations the man's part in life has been action. Girls want stories of love, of sentiment, because for untold generations the life of the woman has been one of feeling, of emotion. So boys and girls turn eagerly to stories. And the press meets their needs. How willingly it meets their needs, with its flood of cheap adventure, cheap business stories, cheap sentimental tales! Poetry, however, does not meet this desire for stories as well as do novels and tales. You get more story, and you get it quicker, in a novel than in a narrative poem. If, however, a love of the sound and rhythm of poetry has been developed in a child by constant hearing of poetry well read, that child will enjoy "The Lady of the Lake" or any of the great narrative poems when they are read to him or skilfully put in his way. His very love for a story, which on the surface is one reason why he avoids poetry, may be careful tactics on the part of parents and teachers, be made to contribute to his liking for good poetry. It does not obviously meet his need as the novel does; all the more reason for those who are educating him to find ways of helping him to find that which is less obvious.
The school, however, is not the only place where children are educated. The home, the father and mother, must bear the greater share in the difficult task. And in this matter, of making girls and boys love poetry by reading it aloud to them, habitually, as a natural part of their everyday lives, the saying of Horace, "If you wish to make me weep, you must first have wept yourself," applies to the parents of the boys and girls. If you wish to make your children read and love poetry, you must first read and love poetry yourself. This is, of course, not true in the cases of children who are born with an unusual love for poetry, which they will satisfy regardless of parental influence; but it is true in the case of the average child. The mother, father, aunt, uncle, or guardian of the child, who reads poetry aloud in the family with affection and understanding, will probably find the child growing up, either a lover of poetry, or, at least, an intelligent critic of it. For whether one care intensely for poetry or not, it is so high and beautiful an interpretation of life that any one who knows nothing of it must always remain uncultivated, only partially educated. In the case of the child who has some natural love for poetry, there will be no difficulty in developing that love, if the proper means be taken. In the case of the child who has not that love, who prefers practical pursuits or outdoor play, the process is both difficult and dangerous. For if too much pressure is brought to bear, the child will feel like a victim, and dislike the sound of a poem all his life.
A father told me that he had suggested in vain to his twelve-year-old son that he read some poetry. The boy scorned the idea as "silly," and said that "poetry was for girls." So his father let him alone, putting meanwhile into his bookcase Scott's poems, Stevenson's "A Child's Garden of Verses," "The Vision of Sir Launfal," and other carefully-chosen books of poetry. One day the boy, half idly, while looking for something to read, opened "The Lady of the Lake." His father found him absorbed, lost to the world, and when the poem was finished the boy said, "It's a great story, and besides, it makes me feel how much I like my camp on the lake."
So much, then, for the fact that young people, in order to keep alive and develop their natural love of poetry, must have it read to them. The schools do much in this line ; I wish they might do more. If every subject a child studies in school, -- history, literature, geography, almost everything except mathematics, -- were in part interpreted by the poetry belonging to that subject, or illustrating it, poetry would become an ordinary part of the child's experience, and he would be immensely refined and ennobled thereby. Since poetry is "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," surely we should not give the child the knowledge, and deny him its finer spirit. Take, for instance, "The Battle of Bannockburn." Suppose that every child, in his study of English history, had that poem well read to him at the appropriate time. Children are hero-worshipers, lovers of bravery. Could any expression of heroic courage be more adequate, more moving, than the wonderful lines beginning:
"Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled --"
and moving on with their inspired and inspiring rhythm to their triumphant close? Just the sound of those lines can't help making a child better, because they call out the best in him to meet their greatness. But they must be read to him, well read, by some one who can read poetry because he or she loves and understands it. Here it all depends upon the teacher. To all her other almost superhuman qualities, we add the requirement that she be a good reader of poetry! You see that, while our theory is simple, its practice involves a number of things, -- some of them as yet impossible.
