finished products and their
value.

CHAPTER VI

THE VILLAGE STREET

Playing store is a game of universal interest. Making a play store is a
fascinating occupation. These are factors which cannot be overlooked in
any scheme of education which seeks to make use of the natural activities
of children.

The downtown store stands to the children as the source of all good things
which are to be bought with pennies. It is usually the first place outside
the home with which they become familiar, and its processes are sure to be
imitated in their play. In their play they not only repeat the processes
of buying and selling, but try to reproduce in miniature what they regard
as the essential features of the real store.

If they are allowed to play this fascinating game in school, it may, by
the teacher's help, become at once more interesting and more worth while.
Curiosity may be aroused through questions concerning what is in the
store, where it came from, how it got there, what was done to make it
usable, how it is measured, and what it is worth. In seeking answers to
these questions, the fields of geography, history, and arithmetic may be
explored as extensively as circumstances warrant and a whole curriculum
is built up in a natural way. After such study, stores cease to be the
_source_ of the good things they offer for sale. The various kinds of
merchandise take on a new interest when the purchaser knows something of
their history, and a new value when he knows something of the labor which
has gone into their manufacture.

[Illustration: FIG. 31.--Box house and stores. Grades one, three, and two.
Columbia, Missouri.]

Being a subject of universal interest, it may be adapted to the conditions
of the various grades. It being also impossible to exhaust the
possibilities of the subject in any single presentation, it may profitably
be repeated with a change of emphasis to suit the development of the
class. For example, in the second grade, the study of the street is
chiefly a classification of the various commodities which are essential to
our daily life, and a few of the main facts of interest concerning their
origin. Those a little older are interested in the processes of
manufacture and the geography of their sources. In playing store, weights
and measures, the changing of money, and the making of bills take on an
interest impossible in the old-fashioned method of presenting these phases
of arithmetic. Disc