Robin's Rambles

Byron, May, 1861-1936Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

2.7

Word count: 16K words
Chapters: 2

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today. Robin's Rambles by May Byron. Author: Byron, May, 1861-1936. Language: English. Class: PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres. Release Date: Jan 6, 2012

Editor's review

Robin's Rambles is a children's book by the prolific British children's author May Byron (1861–1936), falling under juvenile belles lettres in the Language and Literatures class. Byron wrote a great many fairy tales, poems, and children's books over her life; her prose is clear and rhythmic, and she excelled at weaving natural scenery into a child's everyday adventures. The book follows a thread of rambling and works well as an entry-level read in the original English: sentences are short and the narrative pace unhurried, so children can naturally pick up vocabulary for describing scenery and actions as they follow the protagonist about. For adult readers it is more like a small window onto late nineteenth-century British children's publishing, offering a sense of the gentle, lightly didactic aesthetic of the era. This is the free Project Gutenberg electronic edition, easy to obtain and suited to printing out or projecting for shared parent-child reading, as well as to English teachers selecting passages as lower-grade extensive reading material. One caveat: the book is in the original English and bears the marks of its time, so some expressions differ from today's spoken English; readers are best served by enjoying it and training their feel for the language rather than parsing every word.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Parents looking for an entry-level English original for their children
Upper-primary pupils and English learners with a limited vocabulary
English teachers needing low-difficulty extensive reading material
Readers interested in late nineteenth-century British children's literature

Not a good fit for

Readers hoping for tightly plotted stories with strong suspense
Absolute beginners in English who cannot yet read English sentences on their own
Readers seeking an academic edition or one with detailed annotations

Reading tips

For shared reading, have a parent read each chapter aloud first, then let the child retell the gist; there is no need to translate sentence by sentence.
Pull out the passages describing scenery and use them as vocabulary cards for English descriptive writing.
Move at two or three chapters a week, and when finished write a hundred-character Chinese reading response.
English teachers can excerpt dialogue or action passages for role-reading practice in class.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Is this book suitable for children with zero English?

Not really. The book is in the original English; though the sentences are short and the wording fairly simple, it still assumes a grasp of basic sentence patterns and common words. Absolute beginners may be discouraged at the start; better to build up about three hundred high-frequency words first, or read it with a parent explaining sentence by sentence.

What are the features of the Project Gutenberg edition?

Project Gutenberg is a long-established free e-book platform, and this book is a public-domain electronic text it has released. It is free to obtain and usually offered in plain text and other formats, convenient for printing, projecting, or loading onto an e-reader. It contains no modern editorial notes and the layout is plain, with the emphasis on the text itself.

Is the English in the book very different from today's?

As a children's book from over a century ago, it contains a few words no longer common and some longer descriptive sentences, but the language overall is plain and does not hinder following the main thread. Aim to build language feel and reading interest; skip obscure expressions rather than looking up every word.

What exercises can go with reading this book?

You can do three things around the thread of rambling: copy out descriptive sentences, retell what happens in each passage, and write one line of your own association in Chinese or simple English. This trains vocabulary as well as summarizing and expression, and is more rewarding than simply reading through.

Comments

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About the author

Byron, May, 1861-1936 Author

May Byron (1861–1936) was a British author active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Public information about her life and education is limited, and she is known to readers today mainly through her series of introductory books. Ten of her works are held in this collection, most of them accessible introductions to literature and music for general readers, especially young people. Representative titles include A Day with Lord Byron, A Day with Keats, A Day with Walt Whitman, A Day with Robert Schumann, A Day with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, A Day with Ludwig Beethoven, and A Day with Robert Louis Stevenson. These books typically use a single day as a frame, presenting episodes from the lives of poets and composers together with their representative works in a warm, plain style that emphasizes readability and the popular spread of knowledge. Robin's Rambles shows that she also wrote story-like reading for children. Her efforts in popular biographical guides and musical primers remain a convenient introduction to classic authors.