McGuffey’s New Third Eclectic Reader

The third reader begins with lessons on articulation and marks and pauses (punctuation). The articulation lesson reviews some of the words from the last half of the second reader, while the punctuation instruction provides a brief overview of the basic punctuation marks and their uses. Each of these lessons includes a note to the teacher and the articulation lesson includes a model for class drill. These introductory lessons are followed by 86 language arts lessons, each based upon character-building stories, essays, and poetry. Each paragraph or stanza is numbered, which makes it easy to assign portions of a passage or poem as copywork, recitation, or narration. Additional short lessons and teacher notes are found throughout the text. In this reader, students will find spelling words listed at the beginning of each lesson. The first spelling and vocabulary lesson in the third reader contains words from the story that follows, including learn, richly, culling, harvest, cause, wintry, engage, livelong, youth, summer, leaving, and brightest. An effective way to use these readers is to use Charlotte Mason’s language arts methods of copywork, recitation, and narration for any of the lessons presented. Instructions for each of these methods is found in the new 18-page introduction that has been added to this edition. Like Miss Mason, Mr. McGuffey believed in short lessons, learned well, so the Readers provide a convenient source for age-appropriate material to use with Miss Mason’s methods.