McGuffey's Eclectic Readers

Third Reader

By: William McGuffey

Narrated by: Robin Field

Born in 1800, William Holmes McGuffey had a remarkable ability to memorize, and could commit to mind entire books of the Bible. After becoming a teacher at the age of 14, classroom size was just one of several challenges faced by McGuffey. In many one-teacher schools, students’ ages varied from six to twenty-one, and few textbooks existed. In 1835, a publishing firm asked McGuffey to create a series of graded Readers for primary level students. The series consisted of stories, poems, essays and speeches and it is estimated that at least 120 million copies of McGuffey's Readers were sold between 1836 and 1960, placing its sales in a category with the Bible and Webster’s Dictionary. Since 1961 they have continued to sell at a rate of some 30,000 copies a year. No other textbook bearing a single person's name has come close to that mark. McGuffey’s 3rd Reader is appropriate for a variety of ages/reading levels, but most closely approximate 3rd to 5th grades.

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The Narrated Version Is Abridged --- But Read Well

The Narrated version of the revised McGuffey's Eclectic Readers is abridged. In the printed version, starting with Lesson XL in the Third Reader, definitions of words appear at the end of each lesson. Example from that particular lesson: "Hinder --- interrupt, prevent from working." The definitions are not in the narrated version. Similarly, notes accompany the lessons in the Sixth Reader in the printed version. The notes are not in the narrated version. The beginning of the printed Second Reader includes two pages in instruction on articulation and punctuation. The Sixth Reader begins with sixty pages on articulation, elementary sounds, inflection, stress, accent, emphasis, phonics, and many other relevant topics. All these educational topics are left out of the the seven narrated books. Also missing in the narrations are the Prefaces and Suggestions to the Teacher --- Ideally, each of the words at the head of the lesson (in the lower readers) should be read once, followed immediately by the reading of its spelling, and then read again as a word. Example: "cat C A T cat". Likewise, ideally, each of the speech elements discussed in the charts and in connection to diacritical marks should be fully narrated. --- To make things really, REALLY ideal, the page being narrated and the illustration on that page would appear on the computer monitor (or cell phone) during the narration. --- The narrator reads very well and smoothly, with emphasis, stress, excellent diction, pronunciation, animation, et cetera. He is very professional. I myself, attempting to read the books aloud, would be stumbling over my words. --- The McGuffey Readers are great!