New Friends and Second Readers

I have here two second readers, one borrowed from our local Wellesley school, the other that my father used sixty years ago in the Henry L. Pierce School in Dorchester. As might be expected the current one, called The New Friends and Neighbors, has brighter binding, larger type, and more numerous and lively colored illustrations. The background of the illustrations is that of a prosperous antiseptic garden suburb. Boys and girls play and cycle and ride in cars. Nature forms a kindly setting and everyone is always smiling—children, parents, milkmen, policemen, in fact the text of the book itself. Most of it shows the children in their happy activities, but at its close there are some adaptations of animal fables, the animals being portrayed in the huff and puff manner of Disney. New words appear at the rate of two to a page—in all 564 words are used of which 229 are new ones. As the book progresses there is no parallel progression in the subject matter. This is on the general level of the following:

It was time for Halloween fun.

FR

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Francis Russell

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I have here two second readers, one borrowed from our local Wellesley school, the other that my father used sixty years ago in the Henry L. Pierce School in Dorchester. As might be expected the current one, called The New Friends and Neighbors, has brighter binding, larger type, and more numerous and lively colored illustrations. The background of the illustrations is that of a prosperous antiseptic garden suburb. Boys and girls play and cycle and ride in cars. Nature forms a kindly setting and everyone is always smiling—children, parents, milkmen, policemen, in fact the text of the book itself. Most of it shows the children in their happy activities, but at its close there are some adaptations of animal fables, the animals being portrayed in the huff and puff manner of Disney. New words appear at the rate of two to a page—in all 564 words are used of which 229 are new ones. As the book progresses there is no parallel progression in the subject matter. This is on the general level of the following:

It was time for Halloween fun.