teach watchfulness and imitation.  Cat and Mouse, Hot Potato, Ring on a String, are all games that can be played by groups and cultivate quickness.  Ping Pong Football is excellent as a lung developer.  That is the choosing of sides and trying to blow a ping pong ball between the goal posts formed by a pair of salt shakers at opposite ends of a table.  Or blowing a feather across a sheet by opposing sides.  Encourage good, romping, noisy games in which the children naturally laugh and shout.  They are the best of voice-developing exercises, and by such means, and his long-distance shouting and calling to his playmates, the little hearing child gains much of his lung and voice power.  In all his games, as in all his other activities, take very special pains to talk to him, using the regulation expressions and training him to watch for the “It’s your turn,” or “Now, Tom,” “Ready,” “Whose turn is it?” etc., etc.

If the foregoing suggestions have been carefully carried out since he was twelve months old, he will long ago have arrived unconsciously at the knowledge that all things, and all actions, and all feelings, have names, and that the mouth always makes the same sequence of movements for the same thing.  In the babbling exercises recommended, he will gradually come to utter many of the vowel and consonant sounds of his native language; especially those that are made by the lips, and by evident positions of the tongue.  Those sounds that require hidden positions of the organs, such as the sound of C and K in cat and ark, or G in go and dog, or ng in long, he is unlikely to have stumbled upon.  These can be taught when the proper time comes, but their absence for the present need cause no anxiety.  In fact, up to the time when he is three and a half or four years old, the matter of speaking is not one to be much troubled about.  If the conception of language has been given him through lip-reading, and some ability to understand the necessary language of his daily life, his future success is assured.

XIII

SOMETHING ABOUT SCHOOLS AND METHODS

Till the child is at least four years old, the proper place for him is at home, and if he must be sent to one of the large public schools for the deaf it should not be till he is five or even six years of age.

But during these years the mother can gain much knowledge that will help her by visiting as many schools for the deaf as possible.  There are about a hundred and fifty such schools in the United States and eight in Canada.  They vary in size, in character, and in methods of instruction employed.  There are public boarding schools, and public day schools, free to the resident of the state, or city, in which they are located.  There are private boarding and day schools, maintained by charity, or by the tuition fees.  Some of each class are oral schools; that is, they employ only speech methods of instruction, without any signs or finger spelling.  Others are called “Combined” schools; that is, they permit, and in some exercises encourage, the use of finger spelling and gestural signs, while they also give some instruction by the speech method.  There are sectarian and non-sectarian schools, both oral and combined.