282 REPORT OF OFFICE OF EXPERIMENT STATIONS, 



about out of doors at home, and they should be encouraged and 

 aided to extend their knowledge of the things in nature with wliich 

 they are likely to come in daily contact throughout their lives. 



How many last year's birds' nests between home and school ? What 

 kinds? How many and what kinds of flowers, trees, bushes, birds, 

 animals, insects ? What kinds of animals on the home farm, and their 

 uses? ^Yliat plants are raised, and their uses? 



These questions are merely suggestive. They may be modified or 

 expanded almost indefinitely to suit local conditions. If time for 

 nature-study exercises is limited the recitations can be conducted 

 wholly in connection with the other regular class work. In the 

 language class the pupils should be led to tell and write about the 

 different objects seen; in the spelling class they should learn to spell 

 the new names; in the number class they would find keen enjoyment 

 in working out problems based on such familiar concrete material. 



The teachers should also go with small groups of children on short 

 walks around the school yard and along the roads on the occasional 

 noon intermissions, and on longer trips into the fields and woods on 

 Saturda3's. Each trip should be taken with some leading object in 

 view, such, for example, as a search for early spring flowers, or 

 cocoons, or grasshoppers, or weed seeds; but this leading object 

 should not shut the eyes of the children to other things. Direct their 

 observations, but do it in such a way as to stimulate their perceptive 

 faculties. Let them see and hear and feel and smell. Tell them 

 little; they should do the telling. Better wait days and weeks for an 

 answer from the children than tell them now and rob them of the 

 pleasure of discovery, provided the subject is within their compre- 

 hension. At first there will seem to be but little connection between 

 the difi'erent observations made by the children, but the teacher 

 should never lose sight of the fact that very real and definite relation- 

 ships exist between the dift'erent plants and animals of a given locality 

 and between these things and their inorganic environment. Gradu- 

 ally, therefore, these relationships and the relation of all these things 

 to man should be brought out. 



In nature study as in other school work, the teacher should have a 

 definite plan of instruction in which the educative effect of the work 

 on the child's mind should be carefully considered. This plan need 

 not be revealed to the child, and much less should it be reduced to 

 written or printed form for him to learn. It is well, however, for the 

 teacher always to remember that while it is comparatively eas}' to 

 interest and excite a child, it is more difficult to both interest and 

 instruct him. Book work and the ordinary formalities of learning 

 and reciting set lessons should be excluded from nature studies. The 

 problem is to take advantage of the spontaneous curiosity of the 

 child and so direct it by a subtle and unperceived guidance that the 



