WINTER EARTH STUDY. 479 



Important points. The temptation is particularly strong 

 in this study to depend on talk, and pretty stories, and 

 poems, and on the imagination of the children, rather than 

 to build on the only sure foundation, on what the children 

 have seen. In the writer's experience, nine teachers out of- 

 ten are prone to talk about Jack Frost and his beautiful 

 pictures, without making any effort, or taking any pains, to 

 watch, or to have their children watch, the artist at work, 

 or to see how his pictures are made ; too often they do not 

 even look at the frost-work on the windows. Many 

 teachers will expatiate on the beauties of the snowflakes, 

 and have their pupils sing about them, and draw them, and 

 sew them (from pictures in the books), without devoting 

 fifteen minutes to real observation of their exquisite forms. 

 Talk and stories and poems mean little, particularly to 

 children, unless based on, or preceded by, sense-perception. 

 Begin always with what children can see. Relate the 

 rain-drops and frost crystals and snowflakes to the chil- 

 dren's life and experiences, and often endow them with 

 the human attributes desire to be useful, sociability, per- 

 severance- which appeal to children. Then, and not until 

 then, appeal to the imagination ; but let the land of sense, 

 and the life and experiences of the children, furnish the 

 materials out of which fairyland is evolved, and peopled 

 with the fairies of the air. 



We must also endeavor to impress on the children some- 

 thing of the beauty and unity revealed in the forms of 

 water, the unity of cause, all being illustrations and re- 

 sults of evaporation and condensation ; the unity of func- 

 tion or work, all having a work to do, and existing to do 

 that work ; the unity of co-operation, all working together, 

 all unceasingly helping and being helped ; the beauty 

 which the Greeks defined as " multitude in unity " and of 

 which Emerson has written : 



