Nature Study for the Youngest

Ages 3 to 5 · before school

The Kindergarten Age

"How will the Nature Library help with children too young to go to school?"

I hear this question from mothers whose knowledge of Nature is slight. These books form a perfect mine of riches for any one on whom devolves the care of children between the ages of three and five. The less the mother or her helpers know, the greater is their need. An insatiable hunger for knowledge possesses children at this period. The mental horizon widens with every new experience. Knowledge in so many lines is at its very beginning. Recall, if you can, the moment when you saw for the first time a bird's nest! Then came the fact that homes of birds are like this. What wonder that a torrent of new impressions begets a torrent of questions that sets some grown-up people almost crazy! You cannot stem that tide, but you can guide it into proper channels. Nature study is the proper business of these littlest children. The Nature Library is a strong arm for the untutored parent whose child brings in one day an acorn, another a toad, the cocoon of a moth, a katydid, a mushroom, a snail, or a butterfly and eagerly inquires its name, and what it does, or what it is for.

The superb pictures in these books cover every plant and animal that a child may be expected to bring in, or ask about when outdoors. Recognition of things and the fixing of names upon them in the child's memory is the main business of education at this stage. Pictures seen again and again fix the impressions made by seeing the thing itself, alive. The text fortifies with facts the elders who must answer questions.

There is little matter suitable for reading aloud to little children. But material for story-telling is unlimited. Tell stories around the pictures, and note the eager attention they receive.

Suggested Lesson: the Cotton Tail

This little wild rabbit is discovered nibbling lettuce in the garden. Call the children out, and creep softly up as close as you dare go, and all take a look at him. Somebody speaks, and off goes Bunny, his white tail bobbing up and down, until he disappears. Look at the lettuce head, stripped almost to the heart.

What is hare's lettuce? See "Wild Flowers,".

While interest is at white heat take down "Animals," and turn to the pictures, p. 76. There sits your Bunny under the cabbages. Above is a nest of new-born young. Just such a nest may be discovered in the raspberry patch, for briars are the favourite hiding place of this rabbit. If a nest can be found, by all means let the children see it: the blind, helpless babies, the lining of the nest, fur pulled out of the mother rabbit's breast to keep her offspring warm.

Read p. 75, and follow the author's example, by setting a box trap to get a half-grown cottontail to keep for a while under observation, and tame it. There will be no necessity of teaching. The children will learn the ways of rabbits without any help but their own eyes. Br'er Rabbit stories fit into the programme here. Tame rabbits in a neighbour's hutch will interest both the gray rabbit and the children. It is entertaining to all to see how these strangers act toward each other. Look at the pictures of the Snow-shoe Rabbit in its winter coat, p. 86, and the little mouse-like hare cousins, the Pikas, p. 92.

The teaching required is a matter of guidance and oversight, not telling facts and drilling them into the memory. See that the child is getting the habit of clear seeing, and clear thinking about what he sees. Don't exhaust the subject by pointing out things overlooked. You exhaust the child's patience by a mistaken notion that thoroughness is a virtue. Children will get all they are capable of absorbing. A few years later they will swing around to the rabbit again, and with capacity to learn those things that were beyond them in the earlier years. A few clear-cut impressions are enough to fix the name indelibly to the creature--that is the business of the first lesson.

Throughout the year the books on birds will be useful for their pictures, particularly those in colours. The Thanksgiving turkey, on p. 288, goose, p. 138, pigeons, ducks, sea-gulls, Bob Whites, all are in "Game Birds." The song birds are in "Bird Neighbours." Nests and nestlings in "Bird Homes." The goldfish in the aquarium and the shad for dinner send the children to the wonderful pictures in President Jordan's book on "Food and Game Fishes." Turtles, snakes, snails, clams, insects, trees overhead and the mosses and fungi that grow under them--all claim the attention of the wide-awake child and each starts questions that somebody must answer. The Nature Library anticipates these questions and answers them.