What Nature Exploring Can Do for Your Child [ 23 



enjoy nature with him finds this of real help with his school work. 

 He will readily discuss ideas that are presented to him at school 

 when he knows his father and mother are interested. 



Actually it is not always simple to keep up with the rapid strides 

 made by children. It seemed I had barely stopped smiling over my 

 three-year-old's comments, such as, "I know bees make honey, 

 but I don't see how they get it into jars," when he was coming 

 home from the first grade asking, "What is the difference between 

 rodents and other kinds of animals?" A year later he was likely to 

 interrupt lunch with such posers as: "If dinosaurs were so big and 

 powerful, why did they all die?" Suddenly we had arrived at ques- 

 tions that still puzzle many a scientist. 



The important place that nature has in the life of a young child 

 has been sensitively analyzed by Arnold and Beatrice Chandler 

 Gesell. Here is what these eminent experts on child behavior say: 



"There is nothing new under the sun, but to childhood all is 

 novelty. The most commonplace things teem with novelty. 



"Children are in a stage of sense experience when this warm 

 glow of contact through eye and ear and touch may be trans- 

 mitted into the life of spirit; when light, shadow, sound, motion, 

 and touch weave a tangle of lovely associations around common- 

 place experiences and build up a deep appreciation of life and 

 things. Thus the truths of nature become unconsciously associated 

 with emotional response, which deepens and safeguards them. 

 The child learns more through unconscious absorption than 

 through didactic prescription, and in nature study daily contact 

 with the beauty, motive, and unceasing effort everywhere shown 

 by plant and animal gives an impulse to individual character and 

 sets standards of behavior. 



"The child who stands on tiptoe to peep cautiously into the 

 new-found bird's nest, who feels the velvety softness of growing 

 things beneath his feet as he hunts out the tiny wild flowers in 

 the spring, who sows his own garden seed and waits to see the first 

 young green push its way through the dark, moist soil is building 

 up a reverence for life, a sense of kinship with it, which will 

 uphold him in his later and deeper understanding of its meaning." 



