edia_ between
complete silence on the part of the children save when
answering questions and a confusion of tongues like that at
the building of Babel, but there is such a _via media_, and
it can be found by those who seek it diligently.

It is undeniably much easier for the teacher to do all the talking,
the children serving as audience, but the ideal to be reached is that
she shall be the audience herself, or rather the chairman of the
meeting, guiding the conversation, asking suggestive questions, and
making wise comments.

Our language teaching, however, is not confined to the cultivation of
greater powers of expression, for there is a direct gain in the
child's vocabulary consequent upon his kindergarten experience. He
absorbs many new words from his teachers, but many others he learns
through his daily work and play, and these are his absolute
possession,--the thing and the word together. An interesting series of
experiments was once made in the San Francisco free kindergartens
relative to the number of new words which the child had mastered and
used easily and freely after three years in the child-garden. These
included terms of dictation, geometrical terms, names of tools,
colors, materials, plants, animals, buildings, and places, new and
poetic words of songs, games, and stories, etc., and the experiments
established the fact that the child's vocabulary was fully as great as
that of his parents and decidedly more choice.

Relation of Word to Object.

It should be said here that there is great value to the child in
learning to name things correctly from the very beginning. If the new
word is a simple one, he can learn it with perfect ease, and then the
object is properly labeled, so to speak, for future use.[84] Familiar
names are sometimes used in the kindergarten when the correct term
would be quite as easy to pronounce. This practice often arises from a
false conception of symbolism, and is continued with an idea that it
is pleasing to the child. Sometimes the pseudonyms are absolutely
misleading, as in the frequent speaking of squares as _boxes_, which
must, of course, confuse the child as to the real nature of a plane.
There are many cases where the geometrical name of a form can easily
be taught if it is given _after_ the object is clearly understood.[85]

[84] "At all stages of learning the mother tongue, the purely
verbal exercises are more or less accompanied with the