Visual Education (Jan 1923-Dec 1924)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

82 Visual Educatio The lesson is in Lessen your weight teresting. to music. Everybody likes sta This is a stationary tionery. engine. Her waist is white. The waste basket was nearly full. He preceded her in She proceeded t o to the room. wrap up the lunch. The dessert is pine The desert is sandy, apple pie. Word Posters Ruth M. Whitfield New Trier Township High School, Kenilworth, Illinois WHO does not recall a time in his experience when he wondered whether to use immigrant or emigrant, accept or except? Was it not difficult to remember how to spell words so nearly alike as proceed and precede? Another stumbling block was presented in the same-sounding but different-meaning principal and principle; likewise, capital and capitol. Many a time has an innocent sentence like "The angle of heaven had shiny golden hair," or "She prayed for her sole," brought down ridicule upon the head of some careless speller. There is a long series of such confusing words. Some sound alike but have different meanings; for example, preys, prays, praise, or reign, rein, rain. Others, similarly spelled but differently pronounced, are notorious because of constant misuse; for instance, recipe and receipt, dessert and desert. The persistent misuse of the seemingly simple to, too, two, along with the equally trying pair, their, there, is irritating to the teacher. The nonchalant interchanging of these words by the average student is enough to inspire the conviction that red-ink corrections on written work are a complete waste of time. Exercises for drill in the correct use of such words abound in all textbooks for English classes. It is a dull task, however, to wade through pages of cut-and-dried definitions and uninteresting illustrative sentences. The result is that the average student rarely attains a clear understanding of the differences in meaning or spelling; he simply will not go through the grind necessary to master such a mass of dry information. And if the teacher, mindful of her duty, insists upon detailed drill for long enough periods for the student to acquire a knowledge of the precise meanings of these words, the work becomes stale and the class frankly bored. In this dilemma "word posters" offer a welcome device for creating lively interest in the mastery of these troublesome words. The class is set the task of finding, in magazines and newspapers, pictures that visualize the meanings of the words to be distinguished. The student mounts the pictures illustrating each set of similar words on a separate sheet of paper, and under each picture writes a sentence in which the word is correctly used. The accompanying word posters, selected at random from work done in the writer's English classes, bring out clearly and positively the differences in meaning between stationary and stationery ; dessert and desert; rowed, rode, road, and words of like character. A suggestive list of usable words for such an exercise in word study will be found on page 94. The theory of visual education is sound pedagogically, and the intense interest that can be aroused by its practical application is evidenced by the remark of a parent whose son had made an excellent collection of word posters : "I was surprised to see how absorbed Clyde became in his poster assignment. His interest and enthusiasm affected the entire family; one and all turned out to help him by suggesting words and selecting pictures." A further important advantage of these word posters is that additional information beyond the immediate task is readily — and, in fact, almost inevitably— imparted by the ingenious teacher. In business English, for instance, students become familiar with the characteristics of display advertising if the teacher specifies that the pictures must be cut from advertisements in magazines or newspapers. In foreign language classes, word posters serve not only to teach differentiation in meaning, but also as a basis for live and interesting vocabulary drills. These adaptations of word posters merely suggest a few of the many possible ways by which visualization of word meanings may be used to develop the student's interest in word study. What other uses in other lines of school work can readers suggest ? 23*'S "See my new dreis!" "1 knew you would make good!" The road was covered with snow. They rode horseback. They rowed down the river.