FOUR-TEACHER SCHOOL

In the four-teacher rural school each teacher will probably have two grades to instruct. This will make it possible for each grade to have its language recitation of from fifteen to twenty minutes each day. The work of different grades may often be profitably combined, as suggested in the work of the threeteacher school above.

GENERAL DIRECTION AND SUBJECT MATTER

A fundamental duty of the rural school is, in addition to giving instruction in reading, history, arithmetic, geography, etc., to train the child for the life he is to live, to develop in him a reverent appreciation of nature, and to instruct him in agriculture, home-making, etc. Language work in the rural school, therefore, should develop thought, encourage observation and investigation, and lead to correct and intelligent expression about rural activities, not, however, to the complete exclusion of matters connected with the life of the great outside world.

No subject in the public-school curriculum lends itself so readily and effectively to the scheme of correlating practical instruction in nature and farm-life subjects with the regular branches of study as does language work. Every child in the rural school has his language lesson every day throughout the eight years of his public-school life. Subjects for these language lessons must be chosen by the teacher, and

they should, for the most part, be closely related to the child's life and interests if the work is to be interesting and profitable.

Nowhere can better or more attractive subjects be found than in the realms of nature study and agriculture. Subjects chosen from the woods and fields are interesting because they are a part of the child's

AN OPPORTUNITY TO CORRELATE LANGUAGE AND AGRICULTURE

everyday life. In talking and writing about attributes, relations, and activities of objects in the world about him, such as birds, insects, plants, etc., the child, besides gaining valuable information, is adding to his language equipment not words that are meaningless, but words that are really "signs of ideas."

Many of the new activities introduced into rural life in connection with agriculture and the homemaking arts offer an abundance of material for language work. Boys' corn clubs and girls' canning clubs afford many desirable subjects for narration,

description, and exposition. School gardens and experimental plots, as well as experiments in bread-baking, the cooking of meat, etc., also furnish valuable material for language lessons. The poems and gems which are memorized should, in the majority of cases,

BOYS' CORN CLUBS OFFER MANY INTERESTING SUBJECTS FOR

ORAL AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE WORK

touch nature and farm-life activities, while subjects for argument in the language recitation and for debate in the literary society should be taken largely from the same source. The school library should contain as many of the farmers' bulletins on practical farm-life subjects (issued by the United States Department of Agriculture) as may be useful to teacher and pupils

in their research work. It should also contain some good works on agriculture, nature study, and domestic science.

The various kinds of language work outlined grade by grade in the earlier part of this book are as practical for use in the rural school as in city and town schools. The only difference between the work done in the two kinds of schools ought to be that in the choice of subjects for composition work the ruralschool teacher should give the most prominent place to the rural-life subjects suggested in the outlines which follow this paragraph. She ought not to forget, however, that the country child should frequently talk and write about the affairs and facts of life in the city, on the sea, in foreign lands, etc. The following paragraphs are intended to be used in connection with the outlines of language work by grades, given earlier in this book. They are written to give some guidance and help to the teacher who desires to give her language work a more distinctly rural flavor.

1. Conversation Exercises. As has been shown, simple conversation should be resorted to as a necessary means of developing thought and language power in the earlier grades. For subjects in this work rural life affords abundant material. The following outline is simply suggestive :

a. Plant life: corn, cotton, wheat, tobacco, potatoes, oats, and all the products of field and garden; flowers, weeds, and shrubbery, both wild and domestic; trees, both wild and domestic, shade and orchard.

b. Animal life: cow, horse, sheep, dog, rabbit, squirrel, and all others, both wild and domestic; birds, domestic and wild, such as bluebird, bluejay, chicken, turkey, hawk, etc.; insects, useful and destructive, such as the cutworm, moth, house ant, wasp, fly, mosquito, etc.

c. General: pets, playthings, home activities, holidays, the mail carrier; the seasons; clouds, snow, frost, hail; food, cloth

2. Narration. Personal experiences and stories should be told by the children in all grades. In the rural school these experiences will be associated largely with life on the farm and in the woods. It may be a fishing or hunting trip; an afternoon in the woods; watching a mother bird build a nest or feed her young; a successful experience in making bread, or gardening, or raising chickens. Boys' corn clubs, girls' canning clubs, and work in caring for