indergartner.

We may be thankful that this heaven-born imaginative faculty is the
heritage of every child,--that it is hard to kill and lives on very
short rations. The little boy ties a string around a stone and drags
it through dust and mire with happy conviction that it is a go-cart.
The little girl wraps up a stocking or a towel with tender hands,
winds her shawl about it, and at once the God-given maternal instinct
leaps into life,--in an instant she has it in her arms. She kisses its
cotton head and sings it to sleep in divine unconsciousness of any
incompleteness, for love supplies many deficiencies. So let us cherish
the child heart in ourselves and never look with scorn upon the rude
suggestions of the forms the child has built, but rather enter into
the play, enriching it with our own imaginative power. The children
will rarely perceive any incongruities, and surely we need not hint
them, any more than we would remind a child needlessly that her doll
is stuffed with sawdust and has a plaster head, when she thinks it a
responsive and affectionate little daughter.

Middendorf said, "This is like a fresh bath for the human soul, when
we dare to be children again with children.[33] The burdens of life
could not be borne were it not for real gayety of heart."

[33] "If we want to educate children, we must be children with
them ourselves." (Martin Luther.)

"If it were only the play and the mere outward apparatus," says the
Baroness von Marenholtz-Buelow, "we might indeed find our daily
teaching monotonous, but the idea at the foundation of it and the
contemplation of the being of man and its development in the child is
an inexhaustible mine of interesting discovery."

Reasons for Choice of Third Gift.

This third gift satisfies the child's craving to take things to
pieces. Froebel did not choose it arbitrarily, for Nature, human and
physical, was an open handbook to him, and if we study deeply and
sympathetically the reasons for his choice they will always be
comprehended.[34] Fenelon says, "The curiosity of children is a natural
tendency, which goes in the van of instruction." Destruction after all
is only constructive faculty turned back upon itself. The child,
having no legitimate outlet for his creative instinct, pulls his
playthings to pieces, to see what is inside,--what they are made of
and how they are put together;[35] but to his chagrin he finds it not
so easy to reunite the tattered fra