Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/69

Rh through which the little ones enter school life with fearless, happy steps. As the visitor watches the little ones at play, weaving bright colors, building with blocks, or molding clay into forms surpassing in interest even the mud pies of his childhood, he may sigh for his own first day at school. The writer's is an indelible memory. In a rough stone house, with a forest in the rear and a swamp in front—land of more value could not be afforded—he sat for hours, with dangling feet, on a backless slab bench, until called up to receive at the master's knees, from a tattered primer, his first lesson,—looking at and calling the names of queer marks whose appearance was not interesting, and whose use was not known. Fortunate children, for whose kindly and wise guidance over the threshold of education men and women of great minds and hearts have labored, will you, as actors on the stage of life, be wiser and better than this generation?

The practice school has three large assembly rooms and twenty recitation rooms. The assembly rooms have lofty ceilings and great windows which preach the gospel of good air and sunshine, choice products of the children's work adorn their walls, and libraries for the children's use are attractive features. The school comprises from four to five hundred children of the primary, junior, and senior grades. Each grade is divided into classes of fifteen to twenty pupils. Each class is assigned its own room and a teacher from the normal class which has reached the point of practice teaching—the last twenty weeks of the courses. Each of the rooms is an independent school, for whose discipline and instruction the practicing teacher is primarily responsible. One of these teachers has for ten weeks a primary class and for ten weeks a junior or senior class; and the conditions are much like those which a teacher will have in a school of his own. The work of the same grades in the other schools of the city is done; and, in addition, extra work in drawing, color, form, work in modeling, parquetry, folding, cutting, sewing, and shop work with carpenter's tools. Drawing and modeling are extensively applied in the study of geography, plants, and animals. Each class room is adorned with the best work of its children; and ample blackboards give space for work in number, language, drawing, etc. In each is a cabinet to whose shelves field, forest, and factory have furnished treasures which delight and instruct the children. As these cabinets are constantly growing by the contributions of pupils and teachers, they have a future of great possibilities. They are all descendants of that little cabinet stored with the spoils of the Toronto visit.

The whole collection of little schools is under the charge of five permanent critic teachers upon whom the tone and character of the whole depend, and who have the ultimate responsibility for