310 ANNUAL, REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



The AYord science is apt to be associated in our mind with the 

 laboratory, and an array of instruments and appliances. The labora- 

 tory for nature study is all out-doors; and the only instruments and 

 appliances absolutely necessary are the eye, the ear and the under- 

 standing heart. Remembering that all work with children must be 

 based on sense-perception and interest, too much emphasis cannot 

 be placed on the importance of selecting for study material which 

 each pupil can see, hear or feel, and can study for himself, which is 

 closely related to the everyday life of boys and girls, and in which 

 they are or can be interested. Remembering al»o that as children 

 grow older they are not so directly dependent on sense-perception, 

 and that they gain greater power to apply what has been learned 

 through the senses, to think and reason, we see the necessity of leav- 

 ing until the later years those subjects such as physics, which re- 

 quire considerable reasoning power. The study of material plants, 

 animals and minerals, is in general the more concrete. 



They appeal directly to the senses. Children can only conceive or 

 express forces in terms of things which appeal to their senses. Thus 

 the work of frost is ascribed to Jack Frost. Although they may 

 realize that Jack Frost does not and never did exist, they have not 

 any other way of conceiving and expressing force. They personify 

 force for the same reason that their ancestors, in the childhood of 

 the race, personified and deified the powers and phenomena of nature, 

 the winds and thunderbolts. For this reason it seems better to em- 

 phasize in lower grades the study of things, plants, animals, min- 

 erals, and to limit the work in physics during the earlier years in 

 school to the study of water in the form of rain, streams, waves, frost, 

 steam and air in the form of currents, drafts and winds, regarded as 

 forces by children because they do so much work. From this we can 

 pass to the causes and effects of heat, phenomena which the children 

 are most familiar, and later, take up physics and chemistry as ^uch, 

 heat, gravitation, electricity, sound and light. 



It seems scarcely necessary to add that that is best for study which 

 is most common and familiar. We sometimes seem to think that we 

 must go to distant lands to find wonderful and curious things. 



Nature study should, first of all, show the children the wonders 

 at their door-step, the treasures and beauties on which they have 

 been treading all their life. These they have seen and can see every 

 day. Working with these, nature study can relate and make clear 

 old perceptions, and add a host of ncAv ideas. 



The most common weeds, the pebbles in the street, or stones of 

 the pavements, the rain and frost which they have seen so often, and 

 yet have never seen, the most common birds, sparrows, canaries, 

 robins and blue birds, the flies and spiders so abundant all about 



