First-Grade for First Grade

Most first-grade readers are dull because the authors, uninventive to begin with, are unable to surmount the limitation of "controlled vocabulary"--a controversial theory that beginning readers must stick to a few bite-size words and repeat them often. Whatever the ultimate solution, a sensible first step is hiring real writers who can make even a few words dance.

Manhattan's Crowell-Collier Press is now persuading well-known and imaginative poets, playwrights and novelists to accept the handicap of a 798-word vocabulary and still write primers that six-year-olds can read for themselves with all the delight they have learned to expect from hearing parents read aloud at home.

It's Brave to Be a Bee. The first three books in the Modern Masters Books for Children series are lively fantasies on a key theme in children's lives--the scariness of being alone, and the corollary wish to be somebody else. In The Big Green Book, Poet Robert Graves, using only 338 words, tells of little Jack, who lives with his unfriendly aunt and uncle because his parents are dead. One day Jack teaches his keepers a lesson. He finds a green book of magic spells, turns himself into a sly old man, and beats greedy aunt and uncle in a high-stakes card game. In fact, he wins about $200,000 and all their worldly possessions. Then he reappears as little Jack, and the grownups are so relieved that all live happily ever after.

Poet Phyllis McGinley uses 364 words in The B Book to describe a small Brown Bee named Bumble, who tires of Being a mere Bee. To find something more beautiful he can Be, he Buzzes off "as loud as a Bold Brass Band," only to discover that everything Best in the world begins with a B--Butterflies, Blackbirds, Blue Balloons and the Bicycle of a Barefoot Boy named Billy. Moral: "It is a Brave thing to Be a Bee." Poet Louis Untermeyer uses a mere 179 words to embolden his readers in One and One and One. Plot: a cat without a home meets a dog without a bone. Both join a wise old owl and a friendly bear, and they discover:

What's hard for just one

Can always be done

If one helps the other--

Friend, sister or brother.

Gentle Erskine Caldwell. Untermeyer not only wrote for Modern Masters but serves as Crowell-Collier's talent scout in rounding up other writers. Among them: Critic Mark Van Doren, Playwright William Saroyan, Poets John Ciardi, Conrad Aiken and Muriel Rukeyser. That mistress of creepy grownup prose, Novelist Shirley Jackson (The Lottery), has written a sunlit winner, Nine Magic Wishes. Erskine Caldwell, the drugstore Rabelais, has "dumfounded" Crowell-Collier with a primer described as "amazingly gentle." The usually dour Playwright Arthur Miller offers Jane's Blanket, which he outlines thus: "A little girl named Jane sadly watches her big pink blanket grow smaller and smaller while she grows bigger and bigger. Finally Jane is made happy again when threads from her blanket warm a nest for baby birds." If the new series goes on this way, Dick, Jane, Alice and Jerry, the soporific heroes and heroines of the best-known U.S. primers, might finally be put to rest under a blanket of their own.

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