DEARNESs] TRAINING TO TEACH NATURE-STUDY 397 



"The purpose of school gardens; school gardens as a phase of 

 nature-study work; their relation to agriculture and horticulture; 

 the discussion of the purpose and possibility of the study of agricul- 

 ture and horticulture in urban and rural schools; care of school 

 gardens. Practice in planning and plotting a garden; planning 

 school grounds for tree planting in accordance with the principles 

 of landscape gardening; preparation and planting of experimental 

 plots in the school grounds to illustrate the benefits of rotation, 

 fertilizing, spraying, mulching, etc." 



On the practical side each teacher-in-training is required to 

 teach two nature-study lessons. These lessons are assigned a 

 day or two in advance of the teaching of them and are limited to 

 an instruction period of 20 to 25 minutes. 



As a rule, these lessons, indeed all that I have seen of them, 

 would have to be classified as "object lessons." Leaves or seeds, 

 a bird or a plant, maple sugar or corn starch, or som.e kind of 

 objective material is brought before the class and a course of 

 questioning and answering conducted. Much of this kind of work 

 is necessarily "looking and naming" eked out with statements of 

 function drawn from the pupil's recollection of their experience or 

 the teacher's dicta. The term nature-study is unfortunately easily 

 misunderstood to mean information about natural objects and 

 phenomena. Teachers have been known to make a practice of 

 holding up an object or even a picture of one, talking to the ])U])ils 

 about it and quite conscientiously calling that kind of instruction 

 nature-study. The picture might as well be that of a king as of a 

 cat so far as the method of teaching is concerned. The pu])ils 

 received no practice or training in the investigation of their 

 environment. 



What part of any lesson is real nature-study? It is that i)art in 

 which the pupil's reasoning and em.otional powers are engaged 

 upon what his senses and m:uscles are bringing to them. The rest 

 of the so-called nature-study is probably geography or natural 

 history or something else. The part of the lesson in wliich the 

 child was doing something to satisfy his desire for knowledge or 

 enjoyment was the nature-study i)art. The emi)hatie repetition 

 of this truth will finally bring the yoinig teacher to teaeh an ohjcil 

 lesson fairly well. 



The subject of a lesson may, fc^r exanii)le. be the genninalion of 

 seeds. The student-teacher brings to the class room (ir\- Leans. 



