davis] XATURE-STUDY IN THE PRIMARY' GRADES 105 



the experience of the average child. Ax and ox which were 

 honored in the first lessons of the primer of the early days do not 

 have the same significance now and hence have been eliminated, 

 though perhaps unconsciously. 



It may be noted here that in the high school, the laboratory 

 exercises furnish the data for understanding the subject. Few 

 science teachers think now of simply using a text book and ex- 

 pecting the undirected experiences of the pupil to suffice for him 

 to understand the subject. 



It is not less reasonable to expect the primary teacher to 

 direct the experiences of the child and help him through sug- 

 gestions and by other means to gather data that will be definitely 

 useful to him in his school career. As a matter of fact the success- 

 ful primary teacher does do this although she may not be con- 

 scious of it. 



Applying this idea to nature-study the problem of the primary 

 teacher as concerns this subject is to direct, as far as circum- 

 stances will permit, the data-gathering of the pupil. 



A concrete example will illustrate what I mean. A few m< mths 

 ago a favorite nature-study topic for the primary grades was the 

 leaf. I find in a certain state manual these questions from a 

 sample nature-study lesson intended for the first grade: "Why 

 does the leaf turn red?" "Why does the leaf fall?" and a num- 

 ber of similar ones. The answers were not given in the manual 

 for obvious reasons. These are hard questions for a botanist to 

 answer, let alone a six year old child. The teacher might get a 

 lot of answers to these questions. The child would be getting 

 experiences, or rather vocal exercises, but surely not experiences 

 with nature. Such a procedure would be questionable even in a 

 language lesson where oral expression is desired, for language 

 presupposes something to say — not guessing. 



It is just such lessons as this under the guise of nature-study 

 that are doing more harm than good. Here all that we may 

 reasonably expect of a first-grade child is that he become con- 

 scious of the fact that many of our trees drop their leaves, and, 

 that associated with this phenomenon is a prominent display of 

 color on some of the most common ones. This is one of the 

 great aspects of nature in the autumn. We ma}' pretty safely 

 assume that the child is already aware of it, for he is delighted 

 with the gorgeous colors and makes use of the leaves in his play 



