The Child Under Eight

If early education, consist in fostering natural activities, there can be no doubt that Froebel hit upon the activity most prominent of all in the case of young children, viz. t...

"We find in the child's spontaneous choice the nature of the surroundings and of the activities he craves for; in other words, he makes his own curriculum, and selects his own s...

My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky, So was it when my life began So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die.

In every country and in every age those who have eyes to see have watched the same little dramas. What Wordsworth saw was seen nineteen hundred years ago in the Syrian market-pl...

It is an appropriate time to produce a book on English schools for little children, now that Nursery Schools have been specially selected for notice and encouragement by an enli...

Poor mites; you stiffen on a bench And stoop your curls to dusty laws; Your petal fingers curve and clench In slavery to parchment saws; You suit your hearts to sallow faces In...

"Is it Bible story to-day or any _kind_ of a story?" was the greeting of an eager child one morning. "Usually they were persuading him to tell stories," writes Ebers, from his r...

Fairy tales suit little children because their knowledge is so limited, that "the fairies must have done it" is regarded as a satisfactory answer to early problems, just as it s...

"A large bright room, ... a sandheap in one corner, a low tub or bath of water in another, a rope ladder, a swing, steps to run up and down and such like, a line of black or gre...

Play is marked off from work chiefly by the absence of any outside pressure, and pleasure in the activity is the characteristic of play pure and simple: if a child has forced up...

Early in the nineteenth century two men, moved by very different impulses, founded what might be considered the beginnings of the Infant School. For nearly fifty years their wor...

There may be nothing new under the sun, but it does seem to be a fair claim to make for Froebel that no one before or since his time has more fully realised the value to humanit...

Writing and reading have no place in the actual Kindergarten, much less arithmetic. The stories are told to the child; drawing, modelling and such-like will express all he wants...

It is always difficult to see the beginnings of things: we know that stories form the raw material of morality, it is not easy to trace morality in _Little Black Sambo, The Thre...

If it be true that the Infant School of to-day suffers from lack of a clear basis for its general policy, it will be profitable to have clearly before us such principles as grea...

The _first_ thing that matters is what is commonly called the personality of the teacher; she must be a person, unmistakable from other persons, and not a type; what she has as...

The first experiences the child gains from the world of nature are those of beauty, of sound, colour and smell. Flowers at first are just lovely and sweet-smelling; the keen sen...

This aspect of experience comes in two forms, the life of man in the past, with the memorials and legacies he has left, and the life of man in the present under the varying cond...

Taking neither the best nor the worst, but the average school of to-day, it will be profitable to review shortly where it stands, to consider how far it has learnt the lessons o...

There has always been _making_ in the Kindergarten, since to Froebel the impulse to create was a characteristic of self-conscious humanity. Stopford Brooke points out that Brown...

In the Nursery School activity is the chief characteristic: one of its most usual forms is experimenting with tools and materials, such as chalk, paints, scissors, paper, sand,...

It is of set purpose that this short chapter, referring to what we specially call religion, is placed immediately after that on the child's attitude to Nature. The actual word r...

"The first vital principle is that the teacher of young children must provide for them life in miniature, i.e. she must provide abundant raw material and opportunities for acqui...

The principle of Freedom underlies all the activities of the school and does not refer to conduct simply; intellectual and emotional aspects of discipline are too often ignored...

In his _Mother Songs_, Froebel couples rhythm with harmony of all kinds, not only musical harmony but harmony of proportion and colour, and in urging the very early training of...

By means of toys, handwork and games, as well as various private individual experiments, a child touches on most sides of mathematics in the nursery class. In experimenting with...

Reading and writing are held to have lifted man above the brute; they are the means by which we can discover and record human experience and progress, and as such their value is...

XXI. EXPERIENCES OF HUMAN CONDUCT. XXII. EXPERIENCES OF THE NATURAL WORLD XXIII. EXPERIENCES OF MATHEMATICAL TRUTHS XXIV. EXPERIENCES BY MEANS OF DOING. XXV. EXPERIENCES OF THE...

I. "WHAT'S IN A NAME?" II. THE BIOLOGIST EDUCATOR III. LEARNING BORN OF PLAY IV. FROM 1816 TO 1919 V. "THE WORLD'S MINE OYSTER" VI. "ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE" VII. JOY IN MAKING...