href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@27075@[email protected]#Page_177" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">Hammer, Saw, and Plane 177

The Elephant 185

How the Animals Move 189

The Sea-Gull 192

The Farmer Tries to Sleep 197

Wonderful-Cow-That-Never-Was 203

Things that Loved the Lake 211

How the Singing Water Got to the Tub 219

The Children’s New Dresses 229

Old Dan Gets the Coal 237

Six- and Seven-Year-Olds: Content, relationships further removed from the personal and immediate and extended to include social significance of simple familiar facts. Longer-span pattern which has become organic with beginning, middle and end.

The Subway Car 241

Boris Takes a Walk and Finds Many Different Kinds of Trains 251

Boris Walks Every Way in New York 267

Speed 281

Five Little Babies 291

Once the Barn Was Full of Hay 299

The Wind 309

The Leaf Story 315

A Locomotive 320

Moon, Moon 322

Automobile Song 323

Silly Will 325

Eben’s Cows 340

The Sky Scraper 353

FOREWORD

Our school has always assumed that children are interested in and will work with or give expression to those things which are familiar to them. This is not new: the kindergarten gives domestic life a prominent place with little children. But with the kindergarten the present and familiar is abandoned in most schools and emphasis is placed upon that which is unfamiliar and remote. It is impossible to conceive of children working their own way from the familiar to the unknown unless they develop a method in understanding the familiar which will apply to the unfamiliar as well. This method is the method of art and science—the method of experimentation and inquiry. We can almost say that children are born with it, so soon do they begin to show signs of applying it. As they have been in the past and as they are in the present to a very great extent, schools make no attempt to provide for this method; in fact they take pains to introduce another. They are disposed to set up a rigid program which answers inquiries before they are made and supplies needs before they have been felt.

We try to keep the children upon present day and familiar things until they show by their attack on materials and especially upon information that they are ready to work out into the unknown and unfamiliar. In the matter of stories and verse which fit into such a program we have always felt an almost total void. Whether other schools feel this would depend upon their intentional program. Surely no school would advise giving classical literature without the setting which would make the stories and verse understandable. It is a question whether the fact of desirable literature has not in the past and does not still govern our whole school program more than many educators