Education in the Home, the Kindergarten, and the Primary School

by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

One of the other exercises, on the day of using the First Gift may be sewing with the colored threads on the cards; and the colors may be arranged so as to illustrate the connections, &c., just learned. The use of the First Gift need only be once a week. It will then be a fresh pleasure every time during the whole of the Kindergarten course, even if it should last three years. After the children have become perfectly familiar with the primary and secondary colors, their combinations and connections, the lessons on colors may be varied, by telling them that tints of the primary colors and of the secondary colors, are made by adding white to them; and shades of them, (which will, of course, be darker,) by adding black to them. This may be illustrated by flowers, as may various combinations of colors. A very little child, whom it was hard to train even to the hilarious and gay plays, and whose attention could not easily be fixed, surprised a teacher one day by his aptitude in detecting what color had been mixed with red to make a very glorious pink in a phlox. This child liked to sew, but was very impatient of putting his needle into any special holes. It proved to be the pleasure of handling the colored yarns, and he was always eager to change them and form new combinations. It may not be irrelevant to say here, in regard to ball playing, from which I have digressed to colors, that the ball is the last plaything of men as well as the first with children.

The object teaching upon the ball is strictly inexhaustible. Children learn practically, by means of it, the laws of motion. Beware of any strictly scientific teaching of these laws in terms. You may make children familiar with the phenomena of the laws of incidence and reflection, by simply telling them that if they strike the ball straight against the wall opposite, it will bound straight back to them, and then ask them whether it returns to them when they strike it in a slanting direction. By and by this knowledge can be used to give meaning to a scientific expression. It is a first principle that the object, motion, or action, should precede the word that names them. This is Frœbel's uniform method, and the reason is, that when the scientific study does come, it shall be substantial mental life, and not mere superficial talk. It is the laws of things that are the laws of thought; and thought must precede all attempt at logic, or logic will be deceptive, not reasonable. Most erroneous speculation has its roots in mistakes about words, which it is fatal to divorce from what they express of nature, or to use without taking in their full meaning.

In the easy mood of mind that attends the lively play of childhood, impressions are made clearly; and it should be the care of the educator to have all the child's notions associated with significant words, as can only be done by his becoming their companion in the play, and talking about it, as children always incline to do. It is half the pleasure of their play, to represent it in words, as they are playing. In the nursery, the mothers play with the child, and all her dealings with it, are expressed in words that are important lessons in language; and together with language, we give a lesson in manners, by first trotting a child gently, and then jouncingly, to the words, "This is the way the gentle folks go, this is the way the gentle folks go; and this is the way the country folks go, this is the way the country folks go—bouncing and jouncing and jumping so." To describe what they are doing in little rhymes when playing ball, makes it a mental as well as physical play of faculty, and Frœbel published a hundred little rhymes, and the music for as many ball plays.

It is not an unimportant lesson for children to learn, that the same things seem different in different circumstances. The fact that white light is composed of different colored rays can be illustrated by giving the children prisms to hold up in the sunshine; and by calling their attention to the splendid colors of the sky at sunset and sunrise, when the clouds act as prisms, and to the rainbow. Children of the Kindergarten age, will be so much engaged with the beautiful phenomenon, they will not be likely to ask questions as to how the light is separated by the prism and clouds; they will rest in the fact. But if, by chance, analytic reflection has supervened, and they do, then a large ball on which all the six colors are arranged in lines meridian-wise, to which a string is attached at one pole, or both poles, can be given them, and they be told to whirl it very swiftly. This will present the phenomenon of the merging of the colors to the eye by motion, so that the ball looks whitish from which you can proceed to speak of light as being composed of multitudinous little balls, of the colors of the rainbow, in motion, and so looking white.

If some uncommon little investigator should persist to ask why things seem to be other than they are, he must be plainly told, that the reason is in something about his eyes, which he cannot understand now, but will learn by and by, when he goes to school and learns optics.

Children are only to be entertained in the Kindergarten, with the facts of nature that develop the organs of perception, but a skillful teacher who reads Tyndall's charming books and the photographic journals, may bring into the later years of the Kindergarten period many pretty phenomena of light and colors, which shall increase the stock of facts, on which the scientific mind, when it shall be developed, may work, or which the future painter may make use of in his art.

When Allston painted his great picture of Uriel, whose background was the sun, he thought out carefully the means of producing the dazzling effect, and drew lines of all the rainbow colors in their order, side by side, after having put on his canvass a ground of the three primary colors mixed. When the picture was first exhibited at Somerset House, the effect was dazzling, and it was bought at once by Lord Egremont, in a transport of delight; and for twice the sum the artist put upon it, that is, six hundred guineas. I do not know whether time may not have dimmed its brilliancy, since paint is of the earth, earthy; but to paint the sun at high noon, and have it a success, even for a short time, is a great feat; and art, in this instance, took counsel of science deliberately, according to the artist's confession. But perfect sensuous impressions of color and its combinations, were the basis of both the science and the art.

This lecture is getting too long, and I will close by saying, that the First Gift has, for its most important office, to develop the organ of sight, which grows by seeing. Colors arouse intentional seeing by the delightful impression they make. I believe that color-blindness, (which our army examinations have proved to be as common as want of ear for music,) may be cured by intentional exercise of the organ of sight in a systematic way; just as ear for music may be developed in those who are not born with it. Lowell Mason proved, by years of experiment in the public schools, that the musical ear may be formed, in all cases, by beginning gently with little children, giving graduated exercises, so agreeable to them as to arouse their will to try to hear, in order to reproduce.

That you may receive a sufficiently strong impression of the fact, that the organs of perception actually grow by exercise with intention, I will relate to you a fact that came under my own observation.

A young friend of mine became a pupil of Mr. Agassiz, who gave him, among his first exercises, two fish scales to look at through a very powerful microscope, asking him to find out and tell all their differences. At first they appeared exactly alike, but on peering through the microscope, all the time that he dared to use his eyes, for a month, he found them full of differences; and he afterwards said, that "it was the best month's work he ever did, to form the scientific eye which could detect differences ever after, at a glance," and proved to him an invaluable talent, and gave him exceptional authority with scientists.