ere materials for school
study which are adapted fully to interest first grade children? We
know that fairy stories appeal directly to them, and they love to
reproduce them. Reading and spelling in connection with these tales
are also stirring studies. Reading a familiar story is certainly a
much more interesting employment than working at the almost meaningless
sentences of a chart or first reader. Number work when based upon
objects can be made to hold the attention of little ones, at least in
the last half of the first grade. They love also to see and describe
flowers, rocks, plants, and pictures. It probably requires more
skillful teaching to awaken and hold the interest in the first grade
than in the second or any higher grade, unless older children have been
dulled by bad instruction. On what principle is it possible to select
both interesting and valuable materials for the successive grades? We
will venture to answer this difficult question.

The main interest of children must be attracted by what we may call
_real knowledge_ subjects; that is, those treating of people (history
stories, etc.,) and those treating of plants, animals, and other
natural objects (natural science topics). Grammar, arithmetic, and
spelling are chiefly form studies and have less native attraction for
children. Secondly, it may be laid down as a fact of experience that
children will be more touched and stimulated by _particular_ persons
and objects in nature than by any _general_ propositions, or laws, or
classifications. They prefer seeing a particular palm tree to hearing
a general description of palms. A narrative of some special deed of
kindness moves them more than a discourse on kindness. They feel a
natural drawing toward real, definite persons and things, and an
indifference or repulsion toward generalities. They prefer the story
to the moral. Children are little materialists. They dwell in the
sense-world, or in the world of imagination with very clear and
definite pictures.

But while dealing with _things of sense_ and with particulars, it is
necessary in teaching children to keep an eye directed toward general
classes and toward those laws and principles that will be fully
appreciated later. In geography, arithmetic, language lessons, and
natural science, we must collect more materials in the lower grades;
more simple, concrete illustrations. They are the basis upon which we
can soon begin to generalize and