September-October, 1922.

VOL. XXXV-No. 1

FOR SEPTEMBER,

By Dr. Jenny B. Merrill

New York City

Dear Kindergartners and Primary Teachers:

Again I rejoice to greet you after the long vacation which I hope has brought you near to Nature and so nearer to the children and to God.

We all need the change for rest or for study and for a closer touch with Nature at seashore and mountain and lake. May I add even city? I know many of our readers are so fortunate as to have rural life all the year. If any of them have had the opportunity to see life in a big city, they too have new visions of nature, for possibly, they have never realized before what a deprivation it is, not to have God's great stretches of space, of woods, of sky, always greeting you.

Human beings too seem more human when there are not so many of them.

The inmportant question is, however, wherever you have been, at home, on the ocean, in the town, the village, the mountain, the lake, the farm, the seashore, what have you gathered for the children who will soon greet you and to whom you are to mean so

much.

I am sure you have visible treasures to show for you have remembered how the little ones love to "see things." Be liberal the first day, if the babies are not too small, and have several objects and pictures to show cursorily, letting the children find the right shelf on the cabinet for this treasure or that with the promise to tell more later on.

Well do I recall the first shells that were added

to our home curios, shells that talked in your ear, telling secrets of the ocean's roar in whispers! One had the Lord's Prayer engraved upon it. That was not to be played with. One had some tiny teeth with red gums as it were, and they were all so smooth and shiny! No one told us that they were once alive! Perhaps that was just as well at first. The wise mother, the wise Kindergartner, the wise teacher, learns to "omit." Our little ones are learning more in a day than we realize, and we need not force too much upon them lest they have mental indigestion, neither must they starve.

One of the hardest things for a young Mother or a young Kindergartner, or a young Primary teacher to learn is to teach enough and not too much. I have had the pleasure this year of visiting frequently in the home of a wise Mother and Kindergartner who has brought a boy of six to the point where even the sound of a new word attracts him immediately "What does it Mean?"

He is discovering all sorts of number combinations as "two sixes are twelve and a half of twelve is six, isn't it, Mother?" "Yes, dear, that is right!" He has enjoyed making himself count backwards. But he has not yet written numbers. Number is real to him in toys, in measuring, in weighing.

There is in the home, the scale, where even pussy is occasionally weighed. Rosseau advises "count measure weigh."

This boy of six sees you about to throw away a box, or possibly a piece of paper. He says, "May I have it? I can make something with it." And you should see what he makes is immitation of all his observing eyes have noted.

He will sit an hour as you read of "Happy Jack" or of any of Thornton Burgess' animal stories, or again of "Paul Revere's Ride." He already has literary taste.