Nature Study-Agriculture in Rural Schools 



Bessie B. Kanouse. 



If you are a rural school-teacher and you have never tried to 

 arouse the interest of the children in the wonderful, mystifying 

 beauties of nature that are unfolding day by day, begin tomorrow 

 — just begin. Until you have tried it, you can not know, and I 

 can not tell you just how much pleasure it will give, nor the in- 

 spiration and good-feeling it will lend to the ordinary routine 

 of a school day. 



You may think the children already know by instinct about 

 these lovely country wayside things, and the ordinary farm 

 crops, because they live among them and have the chance of 

 seeing them every day. Surely they have the chance, but do 

 they really see? One first day of a fall term, I asked if anyone 

 had seen anything on the way to school that morning that he 

 had never noticed before. Not one new thing had been seen. A 

 short time after we began collecting our nature material of which 

 I am to tell you directly, one of the girls exclaimed, ''Why I 

 never dreamed that so many beautiful things grew on our road- 

 sides and in our fields!" So you see it may be possible that 

 there are many, many marvelous things growing within forty 

 rods of your schoolhouse that you never supposed were such 

 near neighbors. 



No mind seems so responsive to nature as the child mind. 

 There is a charm about the study that appeals strongly to the 

 heart and soul of a child, when he knows it is his to find and 

 his to enjoy. I quote here from Mrs. Wm. Starr Dana, when 

 I say that, ''Through the neglect of nature-study, the wits of 

 the country child lose just the sharpening they most need, to 

 say nothing of a stimulus and delight which can ill be spared 

 by one whose mental life is apt to be monotonous." 



The work I am describing was accomplished in a very 

 ordinary eight-grade one-room country school. No special time 

 was allotted for the work. The instruction took the form of 

 oral and written language work in all grades, morning exercises, 

 or informal talks about the material when it was brought. While 

 it is not nearly all that might be accomplished along this line, it 

 seemed to fit the time, the place and the pupils with whom I. 

 had to deal. 



Early in the spring before the leaf buds had opened, I 

 asked the children to bring branches of as many kinds of trees 

 and shrubs as they could find. We labeled them and put them in 



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