THE NATURE-STUDY EXCURSION 



BY R. O. JOHNSON, State Normal School, Chico, Cal. 

 [Read at California State Teachers' Association at Fiesno, Dec. 27, 1906.] 



The work in nature-study brings the teacher face to face with 

 perhaps more difficult problems than any other line of school 

 work. And if this be true of that part of the work done in the 

 schoolroom, it is doubly so of the work done in the field. It is 

 the purpose of this paper to define some of the problems which 

 arise in connection with the field trip and to offer a few sugges- 

 tions to aid in their solution and further to give a few practical 

 suggestions for making the field trip profitable. 



Before proceeding to a discussion of these problems I should 

 like to state what to my mind are the chief reasons why the 

 excursion should have a prominent place in nature-study. First, 

 it gives to the pupil a breadth of view such as no other subject 

 in the curriculum affords. To most children school means a 

 room with four walls shutting the outside world out and shutting 

 them in. It means books and paper and pens and apparatus 

 of various kinds. Children are too seldom made to realize that 

 school means anything else or that it has any intimate connec- 

 tion with anything outside of itself, hence they easily become 

 contracted in mind and soul. As a consequence many of them 

 have little appreciation for the things about them in nature and 

 often just as little appreciation for the things of the school. 

 They need the excursion in order to learn that their little school- 

 room is only a very minute part of the great school all about 

 them in which they may enjoy the privileges of membership. 

 Second, those parts of the subject which possess for the child 

 the most intense interest mean little or nothing to him unless the 

 question of environment enters in. This is especially true in the 

 matter of protective coloration or protective resemblance, 

 illustrations of which never fail to challenge the admiration of 

 children. The stripes of the tiger and the spots of the leopard 

 are of little significance in themselves, but when it is realized 

 that each of these animals when at home in his habitat is often 

 concealed almost wholly from view by these markings they then 

 contain a world of meaning. Apart from any consideration of 



