In the Finger Play called “The Nest,” Froebel tells the mother:
“The way lies through our imaginative, tender and emotional observation of Nature and of man’s life, through the child’s taking their meaning into his own heart and expressing by representation what he thus takes in.… The child’s sympathy is roused by the young creatures’ necessities more than by anything, and chiefly by their nakedness and softness.”—M., p. 149.
And the action which fosters the growth of sympathy is not to be merely representative; The Garden Song has this motto:
“If your child’s to love and cherish Life that needs him day-by-day, Give him things to tend that perish If he ever stays away.”—M., p. 84.
It is because “the desire for unity is the basis of all true human development” that the child is to be encouraged to help in the work he sees going on around him.
“Family, family—let us say it openly and plainly—you are more than School and Church, and therefore more than all else that necessity may have called into being for the protection of right and property … without you, what are Altar and Church?… Therefore, Mother, in the little finger game, teach your child some notion of the nature of a whole, especially of a family-whole.”—M., p. 159.
“We have not yet touched nor even considered an important side of child-life, the side of association with father and mother in their domestic duties, in the duties of their calling.… (E., p. 84). Do not let the urgency of your business tempt you to say, ‘Go away, you only hinder me.’ … After a third rebuff of this kind scarcely any child will again propose to help and share the work.”—E., p. 99.
It is an essential part of the Kindergarten to consider the child as a member of the human family. It is described in one place as:
“An establishment for training quite young children, in their first stage of intellectual development, where their training and instruction shall be based upon their own free action or spontaneity, acting under proper rules … such rules as are in fact discovered by the actual observation of children when associated in companies. (L., p. 251).… Practice in combined games for many children, which will train the child, by his very nature eager for companionship, in the habit of association with comrades, that is, in good fellowship and all that this implies.”—L., p. 252.
Among his Group Instincts Mr. Kirkpatrick mentions the Love of Approbation, and this receives special attention from Froebel at a surprisingly early stage. It is in the “Mother Songs,” in connection with his adaptation of an old German nursery rhyme about knights who come to visit “a good child,” that Froebel tells the mother that: