Part 2

There are limitations here, as in every other period. The child is and must be more or less self-centered, because this is a time when he must pay attention to himself and get himself adjusted to the world about him before he can send his energies out in service for others, as will be normal in the next period. The reasoning power is very weak, depending upon sequence rather than causality. The interest in people is altogether in conduct and not at all in character; what a person does is what these children care about, not what he is.

Spiritual Needs

The study of even these few characteristics so briefly stated makes it evident that the children have special spiritual needs; that is, certain phases of the great fundamental truths which underlie all religious teaching will make the strongest appeal and be most helpful at this time. For instance, in God’s relation to us, it is not the Fatherhood of God which will appeal more strongly, but the Kingship of God, his authority, his wisdom, his justice and power; but with this presentation of the majesty of the Creator must be closely associated the thought of God as a daily Companion, as a Saviour from the power of sin, and as the Giver of eternal life and a heavenly home. Our relation to God as subjects of the King, and as dependent upon him for guidance, is linked with the thought of the privilege of cooperating with him in such forms of service as are possible to children, and in such manifestations of love as find natural expression in prayer, praise, and worship.

The Junior in his relation to others must be taught to play fair, to obey those in authority, to cooperate heartily in the duties and joys of the home life, and to champion right causes, whether standing alone or in company with others. The duties the child owes to himself which can best be taught and are most needed in this period are the formation of right personal habits, making right choices, and establishing right conceptions of progress.

THE JUNIOR TEACHER

Personality

A great deal is said about the characteristics of the Junior pupils and how these affect the plans that are made for their instruction. They also have a bearing upon the type of adult who should deal with the children in this formative period. It should not be necessary to say that the teacher must be a Christian and a church member, for consistency and common sense alike would demand that he who seeks to prepare recruits for the army of the Lord must be in active service himself. He cannot say, “Go”; he must be able to say, as the Master did, “Come, follow me.” The blind cannot be leaders of the blind. But there are many kinds of Christians and church members-persons who differ in temperament and in ways of looking at religious truth.

The Junior period is a time when the pupils are searching for realities. If normal children, normally trained in the home and church, they have almost unbounded credulity, which during this period rapidly develops with growing knowledge and experience into true faith. This is the God-given time for so strengthening the foundations of religious belief for the children that in the succeeding periods, when doubts will normally arise and sometimes beat most insistently upon the house of their faith, it will stand firm because built upon a rock. It is a crime to suggest doubts to Junior children or to surround them with an atmosphere of uncertainty. The teacher who attempts to guide children in this period should know what he believes, and believe it with all his heart, and speak with no uncertain sound. This may seem an almost impossible condition in an age when most learned scholars find innumerable points of criticism upon which they cannot agree, and concerning which many declare themselves to be agnostic; but there are certain great fundamentals which all must believe if they are to be intrusted with the leading of the young, and those who are chosen for Junior teachers should have the temperament which puts emphasis upon the positive and constructive in belief rather than upon the things which lie on debatable ground.

A person who has not a keen sense of justice, and who is not able to be impartial and to keep in the background any personal preferences that he may have, should not attempt to teach Juniors. The children will apply to themselves the most rigid rules if given an opportunity for self-government, and will rejoice in obeying them, but they will resent with the utmost intensity the slightest ruling of a teacher or superintendent which has in it a taint of partiality or injustice. This does not mean that the teacher of Juniors must be ideally perfect. The impossible is not required of anyone in God’s work; but because “we teach only a little by what we say, much more by what we do, and most of all by what we are,” it is more important that the Junior teacher should cultivate those qualities in himself which appeal most strongly to the Junior child than it is that the lessons chosen for the children shall present those qualities through the lives of the heroes of the past.

The best teacher is one in whom the pupil feels the presence of religion as a concrete, natural thing. The best Sunday-school teaching is an initiation of the pupil into sacred things, and initiation is a process of admitting one to a society of persons and fellowship. Many persons have been asked to say what in their experience as Sunday-school pupils most influenced them for good. The reply, apparently the invariable reply, has been, “The personality of the teacher rather than the content of formal instruction.” Nothing in the way of methods or advice can take the place of wholesome, winning personality that actually lives in the realities of the Christian experience and truly admits pupils into the fellowship of this life.[1]

Opportunity

It is the aim of the Sunday school “gradually to bring to completeness or perfection the worthy qualities and characteristics of each pupil, and repress the unworthy, to the end that he may do the work and exert the influence of a true Christian in his environment.” The Junior period is a time when the Sunday-school teacher is given a unique opportunity for helping to realize this aim. In the child’s physical life this is a time of slow growth and bodily vigor, which makes possible a degree of concentration in work and study not to be expected in the earlier years. It is a time when the memory is both strong and retentive, and the child may make the greatest treasures of holy writ his own for all time if he learns them in these years.

The brain cells are still plastic, though hardening rapidly. It is therefore easy to get the child to act along suggested lines, and through incentives and rewards to secure that regular, voluntary repetition of the right act which is necessary for the formation of a habit. The fact that this is the great habit forming and fixing period of life makes evident at once the large opportunity and the corresponding responsibility of the Sunday school in its relation to Junior children.

Teachers, while endeavoring to exemplify the virtues which they inculcate, should constantly aim to help their pupils to form such habits as regular Bible reading and study, church attendance and attention (which is even more important), punctuality, cooperation, industry, thoroughness, perseverance; cheerful, systematic, intelligent giving, reverence and orderliness. It is tremendously important that the children shall form character building habits at this time; for “whatever is found in the life as habits of thought, feeling, and action at the dawn of adolescence will then be greatly magnified and strengthened.”

Another fact which emphasizes the opportunity this period presents is that at some time during these years, usually toward the end of the period, comes the first great age of spiritual awakening, when the child may be expected to become conscious of his relationship to Christ, and proclaim his newly realized loyalty. In the eyes of the church the child is a member of the kingdom of heaven. It now becomes the duty of the church “to see that the child does not lose his spiritual inheritance; that he is kept in the kingdom and so trained that at the time when he becomes fully conscious of his relationship to the Divine, he will choose to claim his inheritance as a child of God and lead the life for which it calls.”

It is sometimes said that Junior children are “trying,” and this is absolutely true. Each class tries its teacher, not because the children wish to be aggravating, but because it is ordained that they shall gain their knowledge and experience by testing each new situation in which they find themselves, and each new person with whom they are brought into close contact. What they are seeking is reality, and they will experiment until they find out what is true about their teacher. They are not endeavoring to get their own way, though that may often seem to be the case. They never like a teacher who is weak and vacillating, but if in the testing process they discover a teacher who knows what he tries to teach, who is firm and kind, impartial, just, and loving, they will yield to that teacher the truest respect, admiration, loyalty, and affection. The Junior teacher should rejoice in the opportunity that his task affords. There is no other time in the life of a Sunday-school pupil when such a ready response will be made to the right influence, example, and instruction.

GUIDES FOR STUDY AND TEACHING

The Teacher’s Text Book

Two text books are provided with the lessons—one for the teacher and one for the pupil.

In the teacher’s book it has been the aim to give as much material for the individual study of the lesson as is possible within the prescribed limits of the book. Bible passages that throw light either upon the truth to be taught or upon the meaning of the lesson story have been carefully selected. The quotations from the commentators will also be found valuable. The plan of study that will bring the best results to any teacher using this book is first to read carefully the lesson passage and any history intervening between the lesson and the preceding one, to study what is said by the commentators and the Bible references that are given, and to glance over the suggestions under Lesson Preparation.

When these things have been done the teacher should turn away from all books and ask himself, “How can I best present this lesson to my class?” and with the needs of his own pupils in mind, plan the lesson for presentation. After the plan is settled the method of presentation as given in this book will not prescribe a method but may be helpful in the way of suggestion. The importance of individual preparation cannot be emphasized too strongly, for no ready-made lesson can be perfectly fitted to any class.

The lessons for the first half of the quarter are taken from the “morning stories” in the first eleven chapters of Genesis. These stories nourish the soul of the child as few other stories can, because they keep the child in the presence of God. It is a God who not only creates, but guides, loves, reproves, walks, and talks with man as one friend with another. The nine-year-old child is hardly yet beyond the stage where the fancies of fairy tale and myth make a strong appeal. For that reason it seems to him perfectly natural that God in visible presence should meet and converse with his children. These stories, therefore, strengthen the God-consciousness within him, and awaken a response which results in the realization that he, too, may have personal relation with his loving, heavenly Father.

“The ancient Hebrew had no notion of science. He did not ask for the immediate cause of physical events. It entirely satisfied his instinct for ultimate truth to assume that thunder was God’s voice; that God had planted those cedars whose life reached back before the memory of man. He related all mysteries to God, and in that relationship his mind rested and his heart was satisfied.”[2]

This is equally true of the child. His heart is satisfied with God, and he is not troubled with any questions concerning whether these early stories relate actual happenings or not. They are gloriously true because they tell the truth about God. They give the child an axis for his universe, and that is what he is seeking. The teacher should not try to interpret the stories, but simply tell them as nearly as possible in the splendid simplicity of the Bible language.

The Pupil’s Book for Work and Study

This book guides the pupil in his Bible reading and study, indicates verses or passages for memorization, and through the handwork furnishes him an opportunity for making the lesson his own. There are several reasons why this book is of high educational value. One is that it serves to fix the facts clearly in mind and facts are the basis of ideas. Ideas cannot be clearly seen until the facts are mastered.

But the book does much more for the pupil than to put him in the possession of knowledge. It gives him an opportunity to practice obedience in a different way from anything to which he has been previously accustomed. In the Primary Department the children do an increasing amount of handwork, but they do it with the help and under the supervision of their teachers. The nine-year-old child must learn to work by himself and to obey printed instructions.

Teachers examining this work for the first time may think that the pupils’ books for the first year are so stereotyped as to leave no room for originality. That is true in a sense, and the work has been prepared purposely in this way, for before the pupils can do original work, they must have a certain basis of knowledge. They must learn how to follow printed instructions carefully, and be able to make themselves do the thing they are told to do at the time they are told to do it. If through the books of the first year the pupils should learn to be both accurate and punctual, we might feel well repaid even if no other results come from this study. But the fact is that while doing the work exactly as it is assigned they will get the greatest benefit from the lesson themselves, for the spirit of obedience generates an atmosphere in which all the Christian graces possible to a child can best develop and flourish.

The work book ministers to the child’s growing sense of responsibility. If he accepts the responsibility and honestly tries to meet its requirements his character is strengthened thereby. If he shirks his duty his moral nature is weakened.

No teacher can afford to allow the children to neglect the work book. If they do not do the work there outlined, they cannot learn the lessons, no matter how well the stories may be told in class. The child learns not by hearing but by doing. On the other hand the book must never be thought of as an end in itself, but only as a means to an end. In one school the most perfect work book shown in the exhibit represented the most abject failure from the standpoint of religious education. It was made by a boy whose mother had compelled him to do the work and supervised it rigidly. He hated it with his whole heart because he was never permitted to play until that work was done. The mother was exceedingly proud of the book. To have it completed and neatly done was the end she had been seeking, and that she had attained. But the book was well-nigh worthless in the teacher’s estimation because it did not represent the child’s own initiative and volition. When the pupil, incited by example and suggestion and rewarded by commendation, chooses to do the work, the book becomes one of the important means by which the great end of character building is accomplished for him.

The teacher should always have a copy of the Pupil’s Book for Work and Study and do the work in it just as he would like to have the children do it. Of course it should be better done than any child can possibly do it. If the teacher colors the pictures with water colors, uses illuminated initial letters, and writes neatly and plainly, his book will be a great incentive to the children to do the very best possible work themselves.

In the beginning of the first quarter’s work the teacher should remember that these children are still to all intents and purposes Primary children unaccustomed to working alone. It is exceedingly important that each teacher should meet the children of the class during the week after teaching the first lesson and show them how to cut out the pictures for that first lesson and paste them in the book. The children would then be certain to start right, and though it may not be true that “well begun is half done,” a good beginning is so encouraging to the child that he is much more likely to keep up the work and to find it enjoyable. But if he makes mistakes or neglects to do the work at the beginning it is doubly difficult to interest him later. The week day gathering to start the children on their handwork might be called a Work Book Social, ending with games and light refreshments. When the children arrive have them take their books and read carefully with you the instructions on pages 2 and 3 before doing the pasting and writing for Lesson 1. Suggest that the picture sheet be handled very carefully so that the pictures needed for later use may not become marred or defaced in any way. Encourage the children to keep the book clean and neat. In order that the cover may not be soiled from use, it is well to make a cover for each book from manilla paper and place the picture sheet between the manilla cover and the cover of the book so that there will be no danger that the pictures will be lost as the book is carried home. Explain that the reading is to be done each day just as indicated in the book. Great stress should be put at all times upon the doing of these specified tasks regularly and keeping strictly up to date with them, in order that the children may form the habit of daily Bible reading and study.

Incentives and rewards will be found necessary as means for inducing the children to choose to do the work. Juniors do not love work, but are interested in the attainment of results, and when wisely led will learn later to love work for work’s sake. Among the incentives there should be a department Honor Roll, and a Class Banner. The first year children who complete their books satisfactorily should be given a social or outing at the end of each quarter. They like public recognition of every kind, so the prospect of having the book appear in the exhibit on promotion day is a strong inducement for doing good work.

Because of the necessary wear and tear on the book and the danger that it may be lost in carrying back and forth, it is not best to have the pupils bring their books every week to the school all through the year; but in the beginning it is desirable to have the book brought each week so that the teacher may see how the work is being done. After the children are well started the teacher can use his own book in the class in giving any necessary instruction.

The Children’s Bible

In the beginning of this Junior work every pupil must have a Bible of his own, the American Standard, if possible. If the parents will not or cannot provide one, the school must do so, for the child cannot possibly do the work as outlined unless he has a Bible to work with. It is also essential for other reasons. No one can be interested in a book which he does not know how to handle, and it is impossible for any child to become familiar with the Bible if the only time he uses it is on Sunday during the Sunday school session.

If some of the children have a King James Version and some the American Standard, explain that both are translations into English from another language, that the King James translation was made three hundred years ago and that of the American Bible finished at the beginning of this century. Tell the children also that because we think the American Standard gives the meaning more clearly we use it in these lessons whenever any memory texts are printed.

The Rainbow Bookmark

There is no question but that learning the books and divisions of the Bible is one of the hardest tasks that the children will meet during the Junior period. Most of the books have names that are in a foreign language and therefore especially difficult to learn. But as the children commit anything to memory easily in this period, and as the interest in new words is strong, the work is not nearly so hard as adults are apt to think it. But whatever the difficulty may be it is essential, if the children are to get the best results from the Junior work, that in this first year they shall learn the names of the books of the Bible, and learn how to handle the Bible and find references quickly.

The use of the rainbow bookmark has been found helpful in interesting the children in the study and making it easier for them, and in awakening in them a desire to use their own Bibles. Its bright colors are attractive, and the rainbow standing for God’s promises has a beautiful meaning, which is joyfully recognized by the children when they hear the story of The Flood. The bookmark is also useful in conducting department or class drills.

This bookmark is made of nine ribbons in the prismatic colors with indigo and purple, darker shades of blue and violet, and a white ribbon to mark the Gospels. The colors are used in this order: red, orange, yellow, green, blue (light), white, indigo, violet, and purple. The ribbons put together in such a way that they will not tear the leaves of the Bible can be secured of the publishing house at 25 cents for each bookmark.

How the Bookmark Is Used

The bookmark is placed in the Bible by putting the ribbon at the end of the division for which it stands. In this way red follows Deuteronomy, and marks the five books of Law or the Pentateuch. Orange, following Esther, marks the twelve books of History. Yellow, following the Song of Solomon, marks the five books of Poetry. Green, following Daniel, marks the five books of the Major Prophets. Blue, following Malachi, marks the twelve books of the Minor Prophets. White, following Saint John, marks the four Gospels. Indigo, following Acts, marks the one historical book of the New Testament. Violet, following Hebrews, marks the fourteen Pauline Letters. Purple, following Jude, marks the other seven letters. Revelation, the one book of Prophecy in the New Testament, has no ribbon.

There is a peculiar fitness in having white, the combination of all the colors, for the Gospel story, which is the center and climax of all the Bible narratives, and it is very desirable to have the life of Christ marked in a peculiar way which will set it apart from the rest and emphasize its importance. In the regular order indigo, the darkest and least attractive of all the ribbons, would mark the Gospels, and there would be but one ribbon for the letters, which leaves a series of twenty-one names to be learned in one group.

The Bookmark as a Reward

This device is first mentioned in connection with Lesson 8. In the correlated work for Lesson 9 slips of paper of the bookmark colors are suggested as markers for the memory texts, and the children in this way begin to learn the kinds of books in the Bible. A sheet of paper for each color is not difficult to secure and would make enough strips for several classes.

If the school can afford to give them, the bookmarks make a fine reward to give to the children when they have learned the books and divisions perfectly. If the parents can afford to buy them and the school cannot, suggest that they do so but ask them to wait until the children know the names of the books, so that it will come as a reward in any case.

PROMOTION REQUIREMENTS AND HONORS

The Basis for Promotion