(A) GIRL TOUCHING A LETTER AND BOY TELLING OBJECTS BY WEIGHT. (B) ARRANGING TABLETS OF SILK IN THEIR CHROMATIC ORDER. There are eight colours, and eight shades of each colour, making sixty-four gradations in all.
I have designed a set of utensils which are to be made of very light metal, and filled with water. These have covers, and to each is attached a thermometer. The bowl touched from the outside gives the desired impression of heat.
I also have the children put their hands into cold, tepid, and warm water, an exercise which they find most diverting. I should like to repeat this exercise with the feet, but I have not bad an opportunity to make the trial.
For the education of the baric sense (sense of weight), I use with great success little wooden tablets, six by eight centimetres, having a thickness of 1/2 centimetre. These tablets are in three different qualities of wood, wistaria, walnut, and pine. They weigh respectively, 24, 18, and 12 grammes, making them differ in weight by 6 grammes. These tablets should be very smooth; if possible, varnished in such a way that every roughness shall be eliminated, but so that the natural colour of the wood shall remain. The child, observing the colour, knows that they are of differing weights, and this offers a means of controlling the exercise. He takes two of the tablets in his hands, letting them rest upon the palm at the base of his outstretched fingers. Then he moves his hands up and down in order to gauge the weight. This movement should come to be, little by little, almost insensible. We lead the child to make his distinction purely through the difference in weight, leaving out the guide of the different colours, and closing his eyes. He learns to do this of himself, and takes great interest in "guessing."
The game attracts the attention of those near, who gather in a circle about the one who has the tablets, and who take turns in guessing. Sometimes the children spontaneously make use of the blindfold, taking turns, and interspersing the work with peals of joyful laughter.
EDUCATION OF THE STEREOGNOSTIC SENSE
The education of this sense leads to the recognition of objects through feeling, that is, through the simultaneous help of the tactile and muscular senses.
Taking this union as a basis, we have made experiments which have given marvellously successful educational results. I feel that for the help of teachers these exercises should be described.
The first didactic material used by us is made up of the bricks and cubes of Froebel. We call the attention of the child to the form of the two solids, have him feel them carefully and accurately, with his eyes open, repeating some phrase serving to fix his attention upon the particulars of the forms presented. After this the child is told to place the cubes to the right, the bricks to the left, always feeling them, and without looking at them. Finally the exercise is repeated, by the child blindfolded. Almost all the children succeed in the exercise, and after two or three times, are able to eliminate every error. There are twenty-four of the bricks and cubes in all, so that the attention may be held for some time through this "game"—but undoubtedly the child's pleasure is greatly increased by the fact of his being watched by a group of his companions, all interested and eager.