Excerpt from The Nursery Lesson Book: A Guide for Mothers in Teaching Young Children

In making a young child begin to write words as soon as he reads them, my experience has been that it is not wise to allow printing, which at best is but a makeshift, and is liable to form habits which the child must get rid of later on. In writing, the slate, or the sand-table, as suggested by Richter, will be found invaluable the latter is simply a board with ridges at each side, holding a few quarts of sand spread out in a thin layer. With a splint of wood a child can make endless letters and figures. In writing, as in reading, words and not letters are to be aimed at; and while the child may have an alphabet for reference, it is not necessary to memorize the special order in which letters are placed in the alphabet. With drawing, attempts, even of the crudest kind, are required, and there is nothing that a child Of three or four years of age will work at more persistently than the drawing of simple figures. The object lesson must be left largely to the intelligence of the mother, as it is not within the Scope of this book to do more than suggest an outline in this direction.

As an illustration of what an object lesson can be made to teach, I cannot do better than give the following sketch of a lesson upon cotton which it was my privilege to hear recently. The children were Older than those in the nursery, but the principle will apply even in nursery teaching. The pupils were asked to take out their handkerchiefs and examine them. A few questions by the teacher made it clear that while some Of the children knew that their handkerchiefs were made of cotton, Very few had any notion as to what cotton was, where it came from, and how it had become a handkerchief. Then the teacher described the cotton fields, and pointed out the Cotton States on the map; there was a picture of a cotton field in bloom, with the negroes gathering the cotton; 3 dried cotton plant, with the boll about to burst, the cotton sticking out, was passed around the class. Then a miniature gin was put upon the teacher's table, and each child worked it so as to understand exactly how the cotton was separated from the seed; a spinning-machine, very crude, but showing the principle, was next brought into use, and some thread was manufactured by the class; finally, this thread was woven by a little loom, and a bit of very rough cotton cloth was turned out, each child having had an Opportunity to do part of the work and. To see how it was done. It was then Shown that this bit Of stw manufactured by the class was really Of the same kind as the handkerchiefs Of the children. It is safe to say that every one of those children knew more about cotton cloth at the end of that lesson than half the graduates Of our high schools. The time and labor required to Obtain the material for this lesson - the dried cotton plant, the toy gin, spinning machine, and loom, were insignificant as compared with the results achieved. Every mother would find it the easiest thing in the world to make a collection for nursery teaching, which would be a source Of constant delight and instruction to the children; every walk might produce something for the collection.

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