1. Have you ever slept in a house close to a railway? What did you notice whenever a heavy train went by? What made the bed tremble?
  2. If you have stood very near a moving train, how did your ears feel? Why?
  3. How far do sound waves travel after they enter the ear? Could a person be deaf who had two perfect ears? Where would the trouble be?
  4. Draw a picture to show the parts of your left ear, and name each part.
  5. How do you take care of your ears?
  6. Comment on doing each of these things:—firing a bean shooter at anyone; throwing gravel or sand; firing off a cap or torpedo close to some one’s head; boxing a person on the ear; running a nail cleaner or pencil point into your ear; putting on the baby’s cap so that the ears are folded forward; asking your teacher to repeat her question.
  7. Have you tried to train your ears? How?—and why?
  8. Find out about some business, or occupation, in which it is necessary to have very keen hearing, and write a little story about it.

III. Seeing and Reading.

  1. Are you seated now in the best way for reading or not? Why?
  2. Why is it well to look up often, as you read?
  3. How far from your eyes ought you to be able to hold this book to read it easily? If you cannot, what should you do?
  4. Draw a picture of someone’s eye, as you see it, naming the parts.
  5. Draw a picture of your eye as it would look if you could see the eyeball from the left side, and name the parts.
  6. What takes the sight message to the brain?
  7. How does the nerve of the eye (the optic nerve) get its messages? What, then, is light? If the light waves enter the ear, can they make you hear? Why not?
  8. When a baby is born, what care should be taken of its eyes immediately, and why?
  9. Have you ever played any games in which the sharpest eyes won? What were they?
  10. Write a little story about the picture on [p. 59].

IV. A Drink of Water.

  1. Why do we want to drink water? How would you know that your body must have a great deal of liquid in it?
  2. Do you know where the water you drink at school comes from? If you don’t, try to find out; and find out also just how it is brought to the school and why it flows up to the faucets.
  3. If you get drinking water from a well, either at home or at school, tell where this well is—how near the house or the out-buildings. Do you think that any waste from these buildings could drain into the well? Why?
  4. At your sand table or from a sandpile in the yard, lay out a farmyard, showing where the house, the barn, the chicken yard, and the pig-sty, also the privy vault, are. Now locate the well so that it cannot receive drainage from any of these places.
  5. What is the danger in using drinking water from a stream?
  6. How could the germs of typhoid fever get into the milk we drink?
  7. What do we mean by fermented drinks? Name some. What is in these drinks that is so very harmful?

V. Little Cooks.

  1. Do you bring luncheon to school? What do you like to have for your luncheon? Talk about this in class with your teacher, and find out what things are best for school luncheons.
  2. How is your luncheon packed? Why ought it to be neatly done?
  3. How long do you take for luncheon, or for dinner at home? Is this time enough?
  4. What do you do right after eating? Is this what you ought to do? Why?
  5. What foods do you know how to cook? Write out the recipe for something you have made, showing what you mixed and how you did it; and in what, and how long, you cooked it.
  6. Give three reasons for cooking food.
  7. How is fried food so often made indigestible?
  8. Are sweet foods good or harmful? What does sugar come from? How is it made?
  9. Write a little story about one of these things: My First Lesson in Cooking; Our Taffy Party; How I Kept Flies out of the Kitchen; How We Boys Cooked Breakfast (or Supper); My Marketing.

VI. Tasting and Smelling.

  1. If anyone asked you how a lemon tastes, what would you say? What would you say about sugar? Salt? Pepper? Pickles? Strawberries? Cheese? Onions? Radishes? How did you learn about each of these?
  2. What does your tongue do besides receiving tastes? Note in the picture ([p. 86]) how strongly your tongue is rooted; point to the tip of it in the picture.
  3. How does your nose help your throat and your lungs? How else may it help you?
  4. Draw a picture to show how air reaches the lungs.
  5. What are adenoids? How may you know if you have adenoids? If you have, what ought you to do? Why?
  6. Where do the men who want to smoke in the open trolley car have to sit? Why? If children breathe tobacco smoke, what effect will it have on them? Why is smoking a foolish habit? How is it often harmful?