n the
mind. Many teachers miss the happy medium, and in trying with the best
intentions to allow the individuality of the child proper development,
only succeed in gaining excitement and disorder.

Dangers of Object Lessons.

The second gift is, more than any other, too much used for mere object
lessons, and these are invariably dangerous because there is apt to be
too much impressing of the teacher's own ideas upon the mind, and too
little actual handling, perceiving, observing, comparing, judging,
concluding, on the child's part, and that is the only logical way in
which he is able to form a clearly crystallized idea.

We can have no higher authority than Dr. Alexander Bain, who says that
the object lesson more than anything else demands a careful handling;
there being "great danger lest an admirable device should settle down
into a plausible but vicious formality."

How to deal successfully with Second Gift.

It is not uncommon to hear students in kindergarten training classes
(and even some full-fledged kindergartners) express a distaste for the
second gift, and it is, unfortunately, even more common to find the
children dealing with it either sunk in deepest apathy, or mercifully
oblivious of the matter in hand and chatting with their neighbors. The
fact is that we have too commonly made the exercises dull, dreary
affairs; we have doled out the forms to the children and asked a
series of formal questions about them, giving no experiments, no
concerted work, and no opportunity for action. The children have been
intensely bored, therefore either stupid or wandering, and the
kindergartner has attributed her want of success to the gift, and not
to her method of dealing with it.

Let the light of imagination shine on the scene, and note the
answering sparkle in the children's eyes. Who cares for the names of
all the faces on a stupid block; but who doesn't care when it's a
house and Johnnie can't find his mother, though he looks in the front
door and the back door, the right-hand door, the left-hand door, the
cellar-door, and finally the trap-door leading to the roof? Nobody
knows, or wants to know, when questioned if the cylinder rolls better
on its flat circular face, or on its rounding face; but when it's a
log of wood in the forest, and must be taken home for winter fires,
then it is worth while to experiment and see how it may be moved most
easily.

The second gift, too, is delightful for groupwork in