Study of Child Life — Story, Setting & Ideas

Plato thought should be regulated by music, and with this Froebel agreed, but in the Household this is often impossible. The children must indulge in many movements when there is no one about who has leisure to make music for them. Still, when they come to the quarrelsome age, a few minutes' rhythmic play to the sound of music will be found to harmonize the whole group wonderfully. For this purpose the ordinary hippity-hop, fast or slow according to the music, is sufficient. It is as if the regulation of the body to the laws of harmony reacted upon minds and nerves. Such an exercise is particularly valuable just before bed-time. The children go to sleep then with their minds under the influence of harmony and wake in the morning inclined to be peaceful and happy.

A book of Kindergarten songs, such as Mrs. Gaynor's "Songs of the Child World" and Eleanor Smith's "Songs for the Children," ought to be in every household, and the mother ought to familiarize herself with a dozen or so of these perfectly simple melodies. Of course the children must learn them with her. When once this has been done she has a valuable means of amusing them and bringing them within her control at any time. She may hum one of the songs or play it. The children must guess what it is and then act out their guess in pantomime, so that she can see what they mean. Perhaps it is a windmill song; their arms fly around and around in time to the music, now fast, now slow. Perhaps it is a Spring song; the children are birds building their nests. Other songs turn them into shoemakers, galloping horses, or soldiers.

[Sidenote: Dramatic Plays]

Dramatic plays, whether simple, like this, or elaborate, are, as Goethe shows in _Wilhelm Meister_, of the greatest possible educational advantage. In them the child expresses his ideas of the world about him and becomes master of his own ideas. He acts out whatever he has heard or seen. He acts out also whatever he is puzzling about, and by making the terms of his problem clear to his consciousness usually solves it.

As for dancing, Richter exclaims: "I know not whether I should most deprecate children's balls or most praise children's dances. For the harmony connected with it (dancing) imparts to the affections and the mind that material order which reveals the highest, and regulates the beat of the pulse, the step, and even the thought. Music is the meter of this poetic movement, and is an invisible dance, as dancing is a silent music. Finally, this also ranks among the advantages of his eye and heel pleasure; that children with children, by no harder canon than the musical, light as sound, may be joined in a rosebud feast without thorns or strife." The dances may be of the simplest kind, such as "Ring Around a Rosy," "Here We Go, To and Fro," "Old Dan Tucker" and the "Virginia Reel." The old-fashioned singing plays, such as "London Bridge," "Where Oats, Peas, Beans, and Barley Grow," and "Pop Goes the Weasel" have their place and value. Several collections of them have been made and published, but usually quite enough material may be found for these plays in the memories of the people of any neighborhood.

All these plays, it will be noticed, call for very simple and inexpensive apparatus, in most cases for no apparatus at all. Nevertheless there is a place for toys. All children ought to have a few, both because of the innocent pleasure they afford and because they need to have certain possessions which are inalienably their own. A simple and inexpensive list of suitable toys adapted to various ages is given at the end of this section. Most of them are exactly the toys that parents usually buy. But it will be noticed that none of them are very elaborate or expensive, and that the patrol wagon is not among them. This is because the patrol wagon directly leads to plays that are not only uneducational but positively harmful in their tendencies. The children of a whole neighborhood were once led into the habit of committing various imitation crimes for the sake of being arrested and carried off in miniature patrol wagon. It any such expensive and elaborate toys are bought, it may well be the plain express wagon or the hook and ladder and fire engine. The first of these leads to plays of industry, the second to those of heroism.

LIST OF TOYS SUITABLE FOR VARIOUS AGES.