—Place a spoonful of sugar in a glass of warm water and dissolve the sugar by stirring with a spoon. Is the water still clear?
—Saturate the water with sugar by continuing to add sugar and stirring till you can see the sugar at the bottom of the glass. Allow the water to rest a moment. Is the water still clear?
—Mix a spoonful of starch in the water. The water becomes white, since the starch does not dissolve but remains in suspension in the water.
Subject:
strain, filter (decantare, filtrare).
Commands:—
—Take the glass containing the water saturated with sugar and the one with the starch in suspension, and allow the starch and sugar to settle for some time, until the water is clear. Taste the water in each glass, and then strain each glass of water separately.
—Filter the water saturated with sugar and the water with the suspended starch. Then taste of each.
By the time all these commands have been executed, the child will have developed a keen desire to go on, becoming so interested in the meaning of verbs as not to require further commands to stimulate his study of these words. The most frequent question now is "How many verbs are there in the language?" "Are there more in other languages?" etc. To satisfy this new curiosity of the children we have dictionaries of synonyms and antonyms, and word-charts. But meantime they have been building their own dictionaries. One by one they begin to own copy books (rubrics) with illuminated letters of the alphabet. Under the proper letter the child copies his words as fast as he learns them. We are still experimenting on the question of the exact amount of information that may successfully be offered to elementary school children of various ages and stages of development, with the word material required for the notions of natural history, physics and chemistry they may be expected to acquire. We can say, at this moment, simply that each experiment involves the use of a certain number of new words (nouns, adjectives and verbs), which are copied into the word-books (rubrics) as fast as they occur.
VII
PREPOSITIONS