When these are understood in their simple relations the child can reach out and take hold of what he has not seen. This work must be accomplished chiefly through the imagination, an important factor in the education of children. In their play the piece of wood may be a ship, and the water in the basin or pond the ocean. Let us watch this natural reaching out and then we shall be prepared to aid it. Interest is another important factor. The weaving of the new, the unexplored, with the old and familiar in such a manner as to arouse the interest and attention fixes the new as no other method can. If the natural method is followed, the child-mind will grow almost unconsciously, taking in and assimilating the materials of knowledge, which if presented in an artificial and uninteresting manner, would require laborious effort to fix. If we use the term nature study for the most elementary work in geography, where the effort is not so much to impart information as to cultivate clear and discriminating observational powers, then the work of the third and fourth grades should be only an enlarg d and expanded nature study. But whether we call it nature or geography study, we should not forget the chief object to be accomplished. In this little book the author has attempted not to impart information as such, but to get at the meaning of phenomena by showing the relation existing between their various manifestations. Things have far more interest attached to them when we know their history; how they came to be as they are. The child wants to know the "why" of what it sees, and in the explanation of this "why" its imagination is developed and interest aroused as in no other way. HAROLD W. FAIRBANKS. You, friendly Earth, how far do you go, With the wheatfields that nod and the rivers that flow, -W. B. Rands. |