cational handicap' so eloquently described by some of our leaders. Other children had missed a great deal of schooling through illness or the parents’ unawareness of the need for regular attendance. Some had attended up to eight different schools in a short period of years. With true aroha the Putiki people immediately offered to sacrifice their class in favour of Castlecliff, where the need was so much greater. The Friends of the Library appealed to members for more help, began the story hours at Putiki as planned, and undertook to begin at Castlecliff as soon as arrangements could be made. Mr Turner telephoned the secretary of the Friends to say thank you: ‘I have one hundred children waiting for you. When can you start?’

Pressure Cooker Courses In view of the special needs of these children, a ten-weeks' ‘pressure cooker’ course was drawn up, which included examples of the different kinds of literary experience a young child needs — nursery ryhmes, fairy tales, folk tales, stories about animals and people and machines. An attempt was made to encourage

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each child to have something to say at each class, and cyclostyled poetry sheets were prepared with a short poem to learn and an illustration to colour in. These were never a great success; probably they reminded the children too much of school work. Each of the three groups at Castlecliff contained twelve children, carefully chosen and close in age. They came from P.4 and Std. 1, and about half of them were Maori and half pakeha. This bears out the findings of Ian Barham, N.Z.C.E.R. research fellow, that impoverishment of English vocabulary and concepts is attributable to the socio-economic background of children and not to their race.The English vocabulary and sentence structure of Maori children. N.Z.C.E.R., 1965. The actual story-telling was an enormous success and the classes continued until nearly the end of the school year. A warm relationship grew up between the storytellers and their children. One little fellow, at home with stitches in a badly gashed leg, insisted on being taken to the school on story hour afternoons. Classes were taken with new groups of children throughout 1965, and the children from the three original groups were encouraged to continue the book borrowing habit the classes had established. Aramoho School, in a suburb similar in many ways to Castlecliff, next asked for help, and in the last term of 1964, two classes were held there also. The Council for Educational Research was advised of the scheme and asked for assistance in providing tests which might give the Advancement Committee some indication as to whether the story hours were achieving their purpose. One test was administered at Castlecliff before the ‘pressure-cooker’ courses. This test proved unsuitable, and a new test was given to the Aramoho children both before and after their course. The new test was not much better, and all the test results were inconclusive.

Books It was believed firmly from the outset that the effectiveness of all the story hours would be at least doubled if good books were available for every child to borrow regularly. The School Library Service strained its picture book resources to the limit to provide for each of the three centres an initial loan of fifty books, chosen with a good deal of thought and care. The Advancement Committee donated £13 to buy books for Castlecliff, and the Aramoho