THE JONES READERS BY GRADES BOOK SIX BY L. H. JONES, A.M. PRESIDENT OF THE MICHIGAN STATE NORMAL COLLEGE, FORMERLY PREFACE THIS reader is intended as a basal reader for the sixth school year. The selections are made with due reference to the need of a wide range of ideas and a rapidly growing vocabulary to keep pace with the rapid development of the work in other subjects in this grade. The reading book in every grade should at once prepare the way for other work and add zest to it by the use of interesting related matter. At twelve years of age the child is entering upon a definite period of noble impulses and exalted ideals. His school reader more than any other book stimulates these impulses and assists these ideals. These selections are taken from the best literature in the English language. Much distinctly new matter has been used, in which ethical ideas are clothed in the concrete forms to which we are best accustomed in this age. On the other hand, a few standard pieces are used, though they have appeared in other readers. Whether new or old, the selections have that permanent worth which makes them universal in their application. The selections from Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Dean Howells, Mary Johnston, Thomas Starr King, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Edith M. Thomas, Charles Dudley Warner, and John Greenleaf Whittier, are used by the kind permission of, and by special arrangement with, Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., the authorized publishers of the writings of these authors. We are permitted also by the kindness of the publishing houses named below to use the following selections: "The Haunt of a Bird Lover," by Maurice Thompson (John B. Alden); "A South African Desert," by George W. Steevens (Dodd, Mead & Co.); "Spring," by Henry Timrod (B. F. Johnson Publishing Company); "Sleep," by Robert Collyer; "New Things and Old," and "A Talk to School Children," by Wendell Phillips (Lee & Shepard). |