Pictures and picture-books should also be considered; some being in constant use, some only brought out occasionally.  For the very smallest children some may be rag books, but always children should be taught to treat books carefully.  The pictures on the walls ought to be changed, sometimes with the children’s help, sometimes as a surprise and discovery.  For that purpose it is convenient to have series of pictures in frames with movable backs, but brown-paper frames will do quite well.  The pictures belonging to the stories which have been told to the children ought to have a prominent place, and if the little ones desire to have one retold they will ask for it.

It is of course not at all either necessary or even desirable for any one school to have everything, and children should not have too much within the range of their attention at one time.  Individual teachers will make their own selections, but in all cases there must be sufficient variety of material for each child to carry out his natural desire for observation, experiment and construction.

CHAPTER VI

“ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE”

     A wedding or a festival, a mourning or a funeral... 
     As if his whole vocation were endless imitation.

In every country and in every age those who have eyes to see have watched the same little dramas.  What Wordsworth saw was seen nineteen hundred years ago in the Syrian market-place, where the children complained of their unresponsive companions:  “We have piped the glad chaunt of the marriage, but ye have not danced, we have wailed our lamentation, but ye have not joined our mourning procession.”

Since the very name Kindergarten is to imply a teaching which fulfils the child’s own wants and desires, it must supply abundant provision for the dramatic representation of life.  Adults have always been ready to use for their own purposes the strong tendency to imitate, which is a characteristic of all normal children, but few even now realise to what extent a child profits by his imitative play.  The explanation that Froebel found for this will now be generally accepted, viz. that only by acting it out can a child fully grasp an idea, “For what he tries to represent or do, he begins to understand.”  He thinks in action, or as one writer put it, he “apperceives with his muscles.”  This explanation seems to cover imitative play, from the little child’s imitative wave of the hand up to such elaborate imitations as are described in Stanley Hall’s Story of a Sand Pile,[18] or in Dewey’s Schools of To-morrow. But when we think of the joy of such imaginative play as that of Red Indians, shipwrecks and desert islands, we feel that these show a craving for experience, for life, such a craving as causes the adult to lose himself in a book of travels or in a dramatic performance, and which explains the phenomenal success of the cinema, poor stuff as it is.