Moral Culture of Infancy

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T.O.H.P. Burnham, 1864 - Kindergarten - 216 pages

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Page 9 - ... of beauty and use, and the means of giving them opportunity to be perfected. On the other hand, while he knows that they must not be forced against their individual natures, he does not leave them to grow wild, but prunes redundancies, removes destructive worms and bugs from their leaves and stems, and weeds from their vicinity, — carefully watching to learn what peculiar insects affect what particular plants, and how the former can be destroyed without injuring the vitality of the latter....
Page 12 - There are who ask not if thine eye Be on them; who, in love and truth, Where no misgiving is, rely Upon the genial sense of youth : Glad Hearts! without reproach or blot Who do thy work, and know it not: Oh!
Page 156 - O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, An' foolish notion: What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us, An
Page 11 - Children,' observes Miss Peabody, ' begin with loving others ; ' and she has added from the stores of her own experience among the young this aphorism of a wise philosophy : ' Children begin with loving others quite as intensely as they love themselves — forgetting themselves in their love of others — if they only have as fair a chance of being benevolent and self-sacrificing as of being selfish. Sympathy is as much a natural instinct as self-love, and no more or less innocent in a moral point...
Page 18 - was put into their hands, and they were made to read by rote the songs they already knew by heart, and to copy them. It was a great entertainment to find the queer words, and these were made the nucleus of groups of similar words which were written on the blackboard and copied on their slates. We have thought it worth while to give in detail this method of teaching to read, because it is the most entertaining to children to be taught so, and because many successful instances of the pursual of this...
Page 12 - Kindergarten, then, is children in society, — a commonwealth or republic of children, — whose laws are all part and parcel of the Higher Law alone. It may be contrasted, in every particular, with the old-fashioned school, which is an absolute monarchy...
Page 10 - Tending babies is anjrt, and every art is founded on a science of observations ; for love is not wisdom, but love must act according to wisdom in order to succeed. Mothers and nurses, however tender and kind-hearted, may, and of'tenest do, weary and vex the nerves of children, in well-meant efforts to amuse them, and weary themselves the while. Froebel'a exercises, founded on the observations of an intelligent sensibility, are intended to amuse without wearying, to educate without vexing.
Page 17 - ... afterwards all of them in one word, mieaou, and calling it the cat's song. It took from a week to ten days to teach these letters, one lesson a day of about twenty minutes. Then came words : mamma, papa, puss, pussy, etc. The vowels always sounded as in Italian, and i and y were distinguished as with a dot and with a tail. At first only one word was the lesson, and the letters were reviewed in their divisions of lip-letters, throat-letters, tooth-letters, voice-letters. The latter were sounded...
Page 56 - It is often better, instead of blaming a child for short-coming, or even wrong-doing, to pity and sympathize, and, in a hopeful voice, speak of it as something which the child did not mean to do, or at least was sorry for as soon as done; suggesting at the same time, perhaps, how it can be avoided another time. Above all things, an invariable rule in moral education is not to throw a child upon self-defence. The movement towards defending one's self and making excuses, is worse than almost any act...
Page 8 - ... to its own sweet will, at all times when not under direct instruction, — necessarily, in her case, on condition of its being perfectly quiet ; and this one thing makes this primary school the best one in Boston, both as respects the attainments of the scholars and their good behavior. Kindergarten means a garden of children, and Froebel, the inventor of it, or rather, as he would prefer to express it, the discoverer of the method of Nature, meant to symbolize by the name the spirit and plan...

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