Fig. 29.—Cornstalk house. Built by second-grade class. Franklin, Indiana.
Later, four boxes were secured and arranged as a house. The openings for doors were marked off during school time, but were sawed out by a few children who remained during the noon intermission. This is the only part of the work which was not done during regular class time. The papering was done by two or three of the most capable children, while the rest were deeply absorbed in weaving. All made borders. Certain borders were selected for the house, and several children worked together to make enough of the same pattern for one room. Selections were then made from the carpets and furniture already made by the children.
The roof was made chiefly by one boy who "knew a good way to make it." The porches were also individual projects by pupils who had ideas on the subject and were allowed to work them out.
The children became very familiar with every phase of the story and attacked any expression of it with the feeling, "That's easy." They wrote stories, i.e. sentences about bears. Each child at the close of the year could write on the blackboard a story of two or more sentences. They made pictures of bears in all sorts of postures with colored crayon and from free-hand cuttings. They modeled the bears in clay over and over again, keeping up a large family in spite of many accidents.
Coöperative Building.—Figures [11], [12], and [13] show three rooms of a four-room house built by the first and second grades working together. The living room and bedroom were furnished by first-grade children. The dining room, kitchen, and bath were furnished by the second grade. Four boxes were used. (See diagram, page 35, [Fig. 14].) Each room, except the bath, was a separate box. After a general plan had been agreed upon by the teachers, the boxes were carried to the several rooms and each class worked quite independently. When the rooms were finished, they were assembled on a table in the hall and the roof put on.
Fig. 30.—A flour mill. Built by fourth grade. Columbia, Missouri.
The Flour Mill.—The flour mill, shown in [Fig. 30], was built in connection with a study of the general subject of milling by a fourth-grade class. The class visited a flour mill. They were shown the various machines, and the function of each was explained to them. They made hasty sketches of the machines and a rough diagram of their arrangement on the floors. They got the dimensions of the floors and height of the ceiling. An empty box was remodeled to approximate the dimensions of the building. Small representations of the machines were made and placed in the proper relation to each other. No attempt was made to show more than the external proportions in the small representation. The work served its best purpose in keeping the children thinking definitely about what they had seen. The attempt to express their thoughts in tangible form deepened the mental impression, even though the tangible results were crude and lacked many details.