Excerpt from Nature Study: A Pupil's Text-Book

Time was in the history of our schools when a pupil was given a certain subject concerning which he knew nothing and cared less, and was expected to evolve from it a composition that should contain both good ideas and good English. No one seemed to realize that this was a double task that, like Janus, faced in opposite directions. Either way by itself was sufficiently difficult, but for a' pupil to follow both simultane ously was quite impossible. Even to-day an inexperienced teacher too often regards English as the material for the manu facture of ideas rather than as a medium for expressing them. Thus it often happens that, in our elementary schools, the lan guage lessons are a weary work and a strain on both teacher and pupil.

The seemingly natural plan of letting the child express his own thoughts in language either spoken or written marks a new era in the teaching of English. When we go a step farther and confine the language work to those subjects which must interest the child, we shall have ideal conditions.

The correlation of nature study with language lessons is almost inevitable. The child sees certain living creatures and is interested in their life and habits and almost involuntarily he tells what he sees, if the teacher is in sympathy with him, he likes quite as well to write about his observations as to tell about them. And since he is trying to express only what he knows and has experienced, his English is simple and straight forward, and, even when it is faulty, it may be corrected better by good example than by that ogre of school work in English, the blue pencil.

Dr. Overton's experiments in interesting the children of his native town in nature have proved to be of wide interest. No phase of his work has been more important pedagogically than his success in getting his pupils to make notes in the field. Each one of these notebooks which I have examined is a mine of wealth to the teacher of English, if she knows how to work it. In them are recorded observations about bird and beast, ¿ower and insect, showing where the child's interest in the outdoor world was aroused. Such records, taken as start ing points for further personal observations and for reading, will be a source of most interesting information about familiar objects, and must surely result in language lessons which will delight both pupil and teacher. The whole plan of Dr. Over ton's book seems to me simple and excellent, and it can not fail to be of great use to the grade teacher.

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