Kindergarten.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXVII, Issue 3510, 15 April 1905, Page 2

Kindergarten.

As some parents are feeling the need of a school for young children, they have asked Mrs Gray to supply the vacancy. She has acquiesced in to their wishes and will start the school on May Ist. Mrs Gray is well qualified to take up (he work a« she is a trained certificated teacher, and learned the kindergarten system at Home from a teacher who has been educated in Germany. The kindergarten system of education seeks to turn to account the playful and active instincts of little children, and to make them the foundation for s} f £tematic intellectual discipline. The material used for instruction tends to exert the receiving, apprehending, and observing faculties and to bring into exercise the active and formative powers of the child. Nothing promises a better advent of things than the in trodnetion of “ method ” taught by Frobel, the great teacher of Frankfort. To say the least of it, it is calculated to increase the happiness of school hours, to improve the discipline, to foster gently, kindly manners, and especially to advance the children more in arithmetic.

It provides a carefully graduated series of truly scientific object lessons, which are calculated to bring before the children the true elements of all later studies, by enabling them to gain just conceptions of form, number, motion, size, distance, heighfh, weight, colour, sound etc. It forbids forcing an infant mind bycomparing the act to the folly of tearing open a bud to advance the flower. The remarkable range of occupation furnishes a variety of short lessons which keep up the interest of the children throughout the school hours without disgust and fatigue, and yet secures that repetition of facts which is so necessary to assist memory.