h demand
more than a passing notice, because they necessitate greater change in
the methods of nurture.
ACTIVITY
Though the restlessness of the preceding period is still in evidence,
more and more activity is becoming purposeful and willed. While the
child continues to love activity for itself, he is more interested in
what it will accomplish than formerly, but an end is not yet
sufficiently attractive in itself to hold him to an unpleasant activity
for its achievement. For example, he enjoys both the weaving and the
basket, the pasting and the scrap-book, but if pasting and weaving were
laborious and difficult, he would not voluntarily go through them to
obtain the basket or the scrap-book.
It must be noted further, that activity still expends itself more
readily in the realm of the physical than the mental, though there is
increasing pleasure in the quest for knowledge, if wisely directed. The
Sunday School is beginning to recognize what the day school has learned,
that the child both enjoys and masters a lesson which can be approached
through physical as well as mental avenues. In consequence, hand work is
being introduced to aid in religious instruction, as manual work in the
public schools for secular education, with most gratifying results in
both cases.
THE SENSES
More skill, more accuracy and more discrimination characterize the work
of the senses than in Early Childhood. The impressions are richer in
detail and meaning, because of the increased knowledge possessed by the
child. It is a commonplace that we receive from anything in proportion
to what we bring to it. The ear of the musician hears in an orchestra
what the child or the adult without the knowledge of music could never
detect, because he listens with more than they. The child can see in a
picture or circumstance, and hear in a conversation or a song, what once
he could not, because he brings a larger experience to bear upon it.
Criticism of others in the home, the lapses from Christ-like living, the
scenes of the street, things pernicious as well as helpful have greater
significance in character building than ever before. This gives still
graver emphasis to the work of nurture in guarding these wide-open
doorways to a hungry soul.
Growing out of the fact that the senses are the greatest source of
information to the child's mind, the method of teaching by means of
objects has arisen. Rightly used, there is great value in this mode of
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