Adapting graded lessons to young children.—­In the graded series of lessons now most commonly used in the church schools the material is, on the whole, fairly well selected to meet the needs of the beginners and the primary section.  Interesting stories are told, and much nature material presented.  The work is, of course, all presented to the pupils by the teacher, as the children cannot yet read.  In some cases the stories used are undoubtedly too difficult, and not a few of them lack the elements of good story-telling.

Yet the instruction usually centers about the topics most needed by the child at this time—­the love and care of God both for our lives and in the world of nature about us; the Christ-child and his care for children; lessons of kindness, obedience and love in the home, etc.  Because of this directness of appeal the child responds to the material and the teacher finds her task much easier and more fruitful than with the difficult topics of the ungraded lessons.

Graded lessons not all well adapted to ages.—­As the graded lessons pass on into the junior age, the adaptation of material is generally less successful than for the primary grades.  The topics are based less on the interests and spiritual needs of the child, and more on the material.  The lessons for the greater part consist of biblical material only, and are often too difficult for the child to be interested in them or to understand them.  No coordinating principle relates the topics to each other, and the material consequently comes to the child in rather disconnected scraps.  Too frequently this material, because it belongs to a later stage of development, is without any particular or direct bearing on the learner’s experience, and hence not assimilated into his life.

The remedy here is to use a larger proportion of story material, of biography, of lessons from nature, and of such gems of literature as carry a spiritual message suited to the child.  The caution is to avoid over-intellectualizing the child’s religious instruction, and to make sure that we do not outrun his rate of development in the material we give him.  The same principles should carry over into the intermediate, or preadolescence, age.  The hero-worship stage is then, at hand, and the lesson material should be arranged to meet the natural demand of the child for action and adventure.

In planning a graded series of lessons it is not less important to meet the needs of the seniors, or adolescents, than of the younger pupils.  This has not always been accomplished.  Here again, as in the earlier years, the immediate interests and needs of the learner are to be the key to the planning of material.  A series of unrelated topics dealing with a distant time and civilization, with little or no application to the problems and interests that are now thronging upon the youth, will make small appeal to him.  The youth’s growing consciousness of social problems, his interest in a vocation, his increasing feeling of personal responsibility as a member of the family, the community, the church and the brotherhood of men are suggestions of the nature of the topics that should now form the foundation of religious study and instruction.