Baby; Lady Spencer and Boy; Mrs. Payne-Gallway, and so on through a long list. Meyer von Bremen’s Little Brother shows two children eagerly gazing on the newborn baby in the arms of the mother. Millet’s First Step brings in the whole family, the mother supporting the baby toddler as he starts on his journey across the yard to the outstretched arms of his kneeling father. Bouguereau’s Sister and Brother is used to show how the older child becomes a little mother to the younger, and Rubens’s Two Sons charmingly illustrates brotherly love.
To illustrate farm labor Millet and Breton furnish many subjects, from the sowing of the seed to the gleaning of the harvest. The spirit of play—simple gayety of heart—is delightfully illustrated in such subjects as Chase’s Alice, Israels’s Boys with a Boat and Murillo’s Beggar Boys. How all these pictures may be used for story-telling and for the game of picture-posing I explain in separate chapters. The teacher may also have ways of her own for pointing out the lessons she wishes to inculcate.
The use of pictures in language work runs through all the school grades. The picture furnishes something to talk about or write about. It stimulates observation, starts up the thinking apparatus, and arouses the imagination. Among younger children teachers usually prefer story pictures, that is, illustrative or anecdotic compositions embodying a more or less dramatic situation. The pupil is drawn out by a series of questions: “When did the action take place, that is, at what time of the day or season of the
