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The book contains the ordinary nursery games such as pat-a-cake, hide and seek, the carpenter, the charcoal burner, etc. The finger and arm movements to be made by mother and child are described. Moralizings are added concerning the actual or analogous situations represented in the game, thus using the various opportunities that arise for instructional purposes. For example, the play of ticktack involves the intellectual element of telling time and the moral element of promptness.

The "Mother Play" has constituted one of the most important elements in the training of kindergarten teachers, in spite of the fact that it is a relatively crude attempt to put Froebel's principles into practice.

Play materials organized as gifts and occupations. In the further organization of child play Froebel constructed a systematic series of playthings. These were developed gradually by experimentation. They were packed in boxes and sold for school purposes. Some are known as "gifts" and some as "occupations," but they are all materials for stimulating the child's motor expression. They include soft balls, a sphere, a cube, a cylinder, small cubes or blocks which may be used for building plays, sticks which may be arranged to form geometrical or artistic forms, paper for folding, and other materials for drawing, modeling, weaving, etc.

Occupations an improvement on Pestalozzian object teaching. Like Herbart, Froebel started with Pestalozzi's "Book for Mothers" (1803) and other discussions of the latter's idea of an ABC of sense perception. Herbart developed this idea in the direction of training in elementary trigonometry. Froebel, although in 1809 an enthusiastic believer in Pestalozzi's "Book for Mothers," later concluded that the relatively passive observation and description of objects which Pestalozzi described was not as educative as active constructive work and play with similar materials. His gifts and occupations were provided to carry out this conclusion in practice. The

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METHOD OF PLAYING WITH FROEBEL'S FIRST GIFTA BALL Reproduced by permission of the publishers from Froebel's "Pedagogics of the Kindergarten." (D. Appleton and Company)

possibilities of varied activity with some of the simpler gifts is indicated by the fact that Froebel and his friends worked out over one hundred games in which only the ball is used. These games included melodies and the movements of running, jumping, marching, sliding, rolling, flying, etc.

The constructive materials were used for making geometrical forms and "forms of beauty." This was a great deal like the Pestalozzian inventional drawing, using blocks and splints instead of a pencil. The possibilities of such work were developed very fully by Froebel, and even skeptical adult visitors to his kindergarten often became intensely interested in seeing what a variety of forms they themselves could invent with the play materials provided for the children.

Symbolic values of the gifts emphasized by Froebel. — The quotations given earlier in the chapter under the general topic of symbolism indicated Froebel's conception of the symbolic use of such materials. This element in their use has been copied very generally among kindergartners and will be criticized later in the chapter.

The kindergarten conceived as a miniature society. — The principle of social participation was applied by Froebel even in the kindergarten period. Thus Baroness von Bülow, when associated with Froebel (about 1850), said:

By means of kindergartens a place of education is created which represents a miniature state for children, in which the young citizen can learn to move freely, but with consideration for his little fellows. This cannot be done . . . in the family; it needs a larger social circle. (6: 13.)

A sympathetic description of Froebel's kindergarten, in terms of this conception, appeared in a German newspaper (about 1841) as follows:

It is surprising to see the order and harmony that reigns among these little citizens under six years of age. The very smallest of them evidently feels himself to be a responsible member of the little community; and far from wishing by frivolity or perversity to disturb the order of the class, he responds readily to the gentle discipline that rules and directs

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Reproduced by permission of the publishers from Froebel's "Pedagogics of the Kindergarten." (D. Appleton and Company)

the proceedings, and is delighted to lend his small powers to the completion of the common task. It is interesting to watch the children's pleasure . . . as they represent the familiar scenes and doings of ordinary life, such as feeding chickens, mowing, digging, or hammering. The kindergarten games lend themselves charmingly to these little dramas. (9: 166.)

These descriptions depict the kindergarten as Froebel conceived it. It remains to trace its propagation.

Kindergarten in the United States. General establishment between 1875 and 1900.- In the discussion of Froebel's career it was stated that kindergartens were established about 1840 in some of the important German cities and some of the smaller German states but were received with suspicion in Prussia. This gradual adoption continued in Europe; but, inasmuch as the United States has adopted and developed the kindergarten more thoroughly than any European country, it will suffice to trace its further history in America only. The development may be briefly outlined as follows :

1. 1850-1860. Cultured German emigrants, who had left Europe during the troubled revolutionary period following 1848, settled in those American cities containing a large per cent of their fellow countrymen, and opened private schools for their children. These schools very commonly contained kindergartens.

2. 1856. The first influential description of European kindergartens was published by Henry Barnard in his American Journal of Education in 1856. His account was based on a visit in 1854 to an educational exposition in England.

3. 1860. The first ardent American apostle of the kindergartens, Miss Elizabeth Peabody of Boston, was inspired by some of the German emigrants mentioned above, and opened a kindergarten in Boston in 1860. Later (1867) she went to Europe to study Froebelism.

4. 1868. The first American school for training kindergarten teachers was opened in Boston in 1868. Another was

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