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QUESTIONS

I. What is the distinction between work and play? What are some of the values of play in the life of a child?

2. Describe the distinctive characteristics of the play of early childhood.

3. Why are the little child's senses more impressionable than ours? 4. In what forms does the instinct of curiosity manifest itself in early childhood? What should be our attitude toward it?

5. What are some of the peculiarities of a little child's memory? 6. What do you understand by the imagination? What are its functions?

7. Describe some of the ways in which the imaginativeness of early childhood is revealed.

8. Why is a little child credulous?

9. What do you understand by a suggestion? How does it differ from a command? How does an indirect differ from a direct suggestion?

10. What is reflex imitation? Dramatic imitation? Voluntary imitation? When does each appear in the life of a child?

II. Is a little child selfish when he takes all the playthings of the nursery to himself? Give reasons for your answer.

12. Why is it best that a child should be self-centered?

13. Can you cite any illustrations of a little child's sensitivity to the personal attitudes?

LESSON IV

Middle ChilDHOOD

There is no evident transition from early to middle childhood. Most of the characteristics of the former period belong to this. The child of six to eight is still impulsive and suggestible. He is active and restless, and not yet able to give sustained attention, or to concentrate himself upon a disagreeable task. His real life is one of play, and your appeal must be to senses and imagination. He is still self-centered and the creature of capricious instincts and feelings.

Yet the child of six or more differs from the one who has not reached that birthday. He has had a wider experience, of course, which gives a richer meaning to every perception and a more definite control for every impulse. But the great difference lies in the fact that he has entered school. That gives him a wholly new view-point. His world has changed. He has now a place of his own in the social order, and enters into a wider circle of companionship and a more definite round of responsibilities than home or kindergarten had made possible.

1. Physically, this period is one of rapid growth, though less rapid, of course, than that of the former period. From six to nine, weight increases 32 per cent, as opposed to 45 per cent during the years from three to six. Height increases somewhat over 13 per cent, against 25 per cent in the preceding three years. While the deathrate continues to decrease, there is about the eighth year a rapid increase of liability to sickness. This is to be traced in part to conditions associated with the appearance of the permanent teeth, and in part to the relative weakness of the heart, which has less than one-third of its adult weight, and must force the blood over a body which has two-thirds of its adult height. The heart is especially pushed, of course, by muscular exercise, of which the body craves a great deal. This is doubtless the explanation of the quickness with which an eightyear-old becomes fatigued.

2. Physical activity and play characterize this period of childhood as well as the first. But there are manifest differences :

(1) Activity is more purposive and controlled. Whereas the younger child found delight in the mere activity itself, the child of this period

begins to find pleasure in what he can accomplish. Eyes and hands and feet are used in play, no longer in mere aimless exercise, but for sake of some success of quickness or accuracy or strength. He wants to make things, to achieve something. Yet, be it remembered, he has not developed enough control to be able to hold very long to a tedious task, or to see through complications and conquer many difficulties in the pursuit of an end. You must give him simple, definite things to do, and not too hard.

(2) Play takes the form of games, at first with very simple rules, and then more complex.

(3) The child no longer plays alone, but with companions; and rivalry and competition begin. Their games provide contests of power or skill in which each strives to win.

(4) Imaginative play, with its little dramas of make-believe, reaches its culmination in the first half of this period. It continues until adolescence, though constantly decreasing in importance, to be replaced by games of the competitive sort. In this period it often takes the more definite form of acting out some story that has been heard or read—a form in which it may well be used educationally, not only in this, but in succeeding periods.

3. The child's senses are as eager as ever, and to them we must appeal in our teaching. But now he is better able both to use his senses, and to understand the messages they bring. His years of experience, few as they have been, enable him to comprehend much that he once could not. School life is widening his knowledge and perfecting his powers, and casts a new light upon everything that presents itself.

It has been well said that we are able to see as much in anything as we can put into it. It is not the mere seeing or hearing, but the meaning which sights and sounds convey, that is important. And their meaning depends upon what is within one—upon his point of view and his ability to understand.

We always interpret the new in terms of the old. We grasp the unknown only by relating it to the known; to name it even we must class it with some past experience. A little girl of three called to her mother in wonder to come and see how the flowers had melted in the heat of the sun. A bright boy of the same age called a ring-shaped ant-hill a doughnut, and put a young uncle to confusion by asking whether his budding mustache were an eyebrow. We have all heard many such sayings of children, and are often amused at their brightness and originality. They are but simple illustrations of one of the

most fundamental of all laws of the mind-that new ideas grow always out of the old, and that what we already know biases our interest in novel situations and our comprehension of their meaning.

The term apperception is applied to this process of getting meanings. It is the process of interpreting, comprehending, digesting and assimilating whatever presents itself to the mind. It is the source of many of the teacher's hardest problems. If we could just put our own ideas unchanged into a pupil's head, teaching would be a very simple thing. But that we cannot do. We can only present words and things, and the pupil must understand them in his own way and from them construct his own ideas. What meaning does he get? What ideas does he form?-these are the vital questions in every day's work.

The law of apperception is that the meaning of each new experience is determined by the relations it bears to one's ideas, instincts and habits. In early childhood, we have seen, things are apperceived from the standpoint of use and action. The child's instincts in the main determine his attitudes toward what is presented to him, and hence its meaning. But as experience grows, and ideas and habits multiply, they come to serve more and more as the basis for his apperceptions.

To understand, therefore, what your pupil's experience has been, what ideas and habits he has acquired, and so, what point of view he will bring to your teaching, is your primary duty. He will interpret everything you say and do from the plane of his own experience. If you can talk with him upon that same plane, and express your ideas in terms that belong to it, you can be reasonably sure that he will get just the meaning you want him to get. If you cannot, he will get some meaning or other, but not what you intend.

It is especially difficult to share the point of view of children from six to eight, and to make sure that we understand their apperceptions. Younger children are more dominated by instinct, and so tend to look at things in the same general way. Older children are nearer to our own plane, and reading has thrown open to them the common heritage of the race. Middle childhood is a transition time-from home to school, from play to work, from instinct to will, from imagination to reason. Each child is working out his own ideas from the host of new experiences that are coming to him, and he is bound to get some that are strange enough from our standpoint.

We must be careful not to assume that the child knows things which he really does not. A number of investigations have revealed a some.

what surprising ignorance of common things among children who are entering school. At Boston, of two hundred children entering school in the fall of 1880, President Hall found that 60 per cent did not know a robin, and 91 per cent an elm tree; 54 per cent had never seen a sheep; 50 per cent did not know what butter is made of, and 20 per cent were ignorant that milk comes from cows; 78 per cent did not know what dew is; 90 per cent could not locate their ribs, 81 per cent their lungs, 70 per cent their wrists, 65 per cent ankles, and 25 per cent elbows; 21 per cent did not know the difference between their right and left hands ; 28 per cent did not know what a hill is, and 35 per cent had never been in the country. Speaking to the public school teacher, President Hall draws these conclusions among others: (1) "There is next to nothing of pedagogic value, the knowledge of which it is safe to assume at the outset of school life." (2) "Every teacher on starting with a new class or in a new locality, to make sure that his efforts along some lines are not utterly lost, should undertake to explore carefully, section by section, children's minds with all the tact and ingenuity he can command and acquire, to determine exactly what is already known." *

Such a detailed investigation of the pupil's ideas, of course, cannot be undertaken by the Sunday school teacher; yet the spirit of these two conclusions should possess us. And our task is really very much simpler in this regard than that of the teacher in the public schools, just because we can count on the ideas which the child gets from him. There is one very definite and practical way for you to get into touch with the child's apperceptions. Visit his grade in the public schools; find out what he is learning there; and bring your teaching into as close correlation with it as you can.

4. The imagination of middle childhood is no less active, but more coherent and better controlled than that of early childhood. We have just seen that imaginative play reaches its culmination in this period. The same is true of the appetite for stories.

(1) The child is as eager as ever for stories. They must have more of detail and of connected action than those which appealed to him when younger. They must be dramatic, with plenty of life and movement, yet with a unity and coherence that brings them nearer to the plane of reality.

"Here is opportunity to fill the mind with a stock of images that shall represent life in its truth. The stories should not be

*Hall: "Aspects of Child Life and Education," ch. i.

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