houses and streets, fences and rivers, trees and animals for the gardens. In fact, the play of the children furnishes more opportunity for making things than there is time for in the school year. This construction work not only fills the children with the interest and enthusiasm they always show for any good game, but teaches them the use of work. In supplying the needs of the dolls and their own games, they are supplying in miniature the needs of society, and are acquiring control over the tools that society actually uses in meeting these wants. Boys and girls alike take the same interest in all these occupations, whether they are sewing and playing with dolls, or marble making and carpentry. The idea that certain games and occupations are for boys and others for girls is a purely artificial one that has developed as a reflection of the conditions existing in adult life. It does not occur to a boy that dolls are not just as fascinating and legitimate a plaything for him as for his sister, until some one puts the idea into his head.
The program of this kindergarten is not devoted exclusively to play construction. It occupies the place of the paper folding, pricking and sewing and the object lesson work of the older kindergartens, leaving plenty of time every day to try their playthings and to take care of their little gardens out of doors, as well as for group games, stories and songs.
An interesting application of the play motive is being tried at the Teachers’ College playground, by the same teachers who are conducting the kindergarten. There is an outdoor playground for the use of the younger grades after school hours. Instead of spending their time doing gymnastic exercises or playing group games the children are making a town. They use large packing cases for houses and stores, two or three children taking care of each one; and have worked out quite an elaborate town organization, with a telephone, mail and police service, a bank to coin money, and ingenious schemes for keeping the cash in circulation. Much of the time is spent in carpentry work, building and repairing the houses and making wagons, furniture for the houses, or stock for the two stores. The work affords almost as much physical exercise as the ordinary sort of playground. It keeps the children busy and happy in a much more effective way, for besides healthy play in the open air they are learning to take a useful and responsible share in a community.
A kindergarten conducted along the same lines exists in Pittsburgh as part of the city university. It is called “The School of Childhood,” and emphasizes the healthy physical development of the children. The work is centered around the natural interests of children; and while they apparently do not do as much construction work as in the Teachers’ College kindergarten, there is more individual play. The writer has not visited the school, but it seems to embrace a number of novel elements that ought to be suggestive to any one interested in educational experiments.
The “Play School” conducted by Miss Pratt in New York City organizes all the work around the play activities of little children. Quoting Miss Pratt, her plan is: “To offer an opportunity to the child to pick up the thread of life in his own community, and to express what he gets in an individual way. The experiment concerns itself with getting subject-matter first hand, and it is assumed that the child has much information to begin with, that he is adding to it day by day, that it is possible to direct his attention so that he may get his information in a more related way; and with applying such information to individual schemes of play with related toys and blocks as well as expressing himself through such general means as drawing, dramatization, and spoken language.”
The children are of kindergarten age and come from homes where the opportunities for real activity are limited. Each child has floor space of his own with a rug, and screens to isolate him sufficiently so that his work is really individual. There is a small work shop in the room where the pupils can make or alter things they need in their play. The tools are full size, and miscellaneous scraps of wood are used. In cupboards and shelves around the room are all sorts of material: toys, big and little blocks, clay, pieces of cloth, needle and thread, and a set of Montessori material. Each child has scissors, paper, paints, and pencil of his own, and is free to use all the material as he chooses. He selects either isolated objects he wants to make, or lays out some larger construction, such as a railroad track and stations, or a doll’s house, or a small town or farm, and then from the material at hand works out his own execution of his idea. One piece of work often lasts over several days, and involves considerable incidental construction, such as tracks and signals, clay dishes, furniture or new clothes for the doll. The rôle of the teacher is to teach the pupil processes and control of tools, not in a prearranged scale but as they are needed in construction. The teacher has every opportunity to see the individual’s weaknesses and abilities and so to check or stimulate at the proper time. Besides the motor control which the pupils develop through their handling of material, they are constantly increasing their ingenuity and initiative.
Constructing in miniature the things they see around them.
(Play School, New York City.)
The elements of number work are taught in connection with the construction; and if a child shows a desire to make letters or signs in connection with his other work, he is helped and shown how. The toys used are particularly good. There are flat wooden dolls about half an inch thick, men, women, and children, whose joints bend so that they will stay in any position; all sorts of farm animals and two or three kinds of little wagons that fit the dolls; quantities of big blocks that fasten together with wooden pegs, so that the houses and bridges do not fall down. Everything is strongly made on the simplest plan, so that material can be used not only freely but also effectively. Each success is a stimulus to new and more complicated effort. There is no discouragement from slipshod stuff. The pupils take care of the toys themselves, getting them out and putting them away. They also care for the classroom and serve their mid-morning luncheon. This work, coupled with the fact that the constructions are almost always miniature copies of the things that the pupils see in their community, saves the work from any hint of artificiality. The children’s constructions grow out of the observations already spoken of (p. 100), and give a motive for talking over what they have seen and making new, more extensive and more accurate observations.
The natural desire of children to play can, of course, be made the most of in the lowest grades, but there is one element of the play instinct which schools are utilizing in the higher grades—that is, the instinct for dramatization, for make-believe in action. All children love to pretend that they are some body or thing other than themselves; they love to make a situation real by going through the motions it suggests. Abstract ideas are hard to understand; the child is never quite sure whether he really understands or not. Allow him to act out the idea and it becomes real to him, or the lack of understanding is shown in what is done. Action is the test of comprehension. This is simply another way of saying that learning by doing is a better way to learn than by listening—the difference of dramatization from the work already described lies in the things the child is learning. He is no longer dealing with material where things are needed to carry an act to a successful result, but with ideas which need action to make them real. Schools are making use of dramatization in all sorts of different ways to make teaching more concrete. For older children dramatization is used principally in the strict sense of the word; that is, by having pupils act in plays, either as a means of making the English or history more real, or simply for the emotional and imaginative value of the work. With the little children it is used as an aid in the teaching of history, English, reading, or arithmetic, and is often combined with other forms of activity.
Many schools use dramatization as a help in teaching the first steps of any subject, especially in the lower grades. A first year class, for example, act the subject-matter of their regular reading lesson, each child having the part of one of the characters of the story, animal or person. This insures an idea of the situation as a whole, so that reading ceases to be simply an attempt to recognize and pronounce isolated words and phrases. Moreover, the interest of the situation carries children along, and enlists attention to difficulties of phraseology which might, if attacked as
