OCR Text |
Show wmn'MWiajBiw ui.w .uiwiwi in mi u mrnti 1 Kindergarten Helps for Parents Articles Issued by the Department I of the Interior, litirenuof Education I utid the I Na tionat Kindergarten A ssocia tlon I DAD' By HENRY TURNER BAILEY. Children's children are the crown of olf men; and the elory of cliiklren are their fathers. Prov. 17:0. Shake hands, Dad. How many children chil-dren call you that? There are live who have called me Dud or l'a or Poppy. Pop-py. Excuse me for mentioning it, but I want you (o know that I am no mere theorist In this matter of being the father fa-ther of a family. Now here is some straight stuff: It Is father's duty to give some time every ev-ery week to his boys and girls. The only time I have been able to give to mine is Sunday. My Sundays have belonged to the children. I have been to church and Sunday school with them always, because in the light of some hundreds of years of history, there is nothing that yields better returns, in the long run. than habitual reverence for God. "Only those who believe in God do good in private," say the French. Sunday afternoons we have always taken a walk, when the weather permitted, per-mitted, or if too stormy, we have read story books together, or have made various va-rious kinds of scrap books. Much Time to Nature Study. In our walks we usually had a definite defi-nite objective. We went to see somebody, some-body, or to get a particular view, or to visit our favorite trees, or to look for some one thing in particular. We counted birds' nests one trip; on another an-other we searched for cocoons; on a third, dug into old stumps to see what we -could discover; or looked under pieces of wood and bark ; found the smallest growing things; collected leaves or seed packs of as many kinds as possible ; learned the wild flowers, the birds, the butterflies and. moths, the ferns, the trees, the mushrooms; made collections of colored things-flowers, things-flowers, leaves, insects, pebbles and so forth, and arranged them in the spectrum order; followed a brook in summer with Tennyson's Brook as a guide; followed one in winter with Lowell's Brook (in the Vision of Sir Launfal) as a guide. In a word we studied God's great wonderful outdoor out-door book in the afternoon, just as diligently dili-gently as we studied the best literature in the morning. And what results? Five open-eyed, open-minded, intelligent young men and women, devoted to their parents and grateful for what their heavenly father and his children have done for them, a mother who, is still young and happy (because she got a little rest on, Sunday during" those strenuous years), to say nothing of a father who now thanks God for the privilege of still being a boy though in his fifties. Family Interested Own Members. We shall never forget those long evenings eve-nings in our city home when the girls came back from seminary and high school, and the boys from Harvard and "Tech," and we sat around the dinner table together, forgetful of time. We were all more entertaining to each other than any show ever staged, because by this time each of the children bad discovered his own special field of interest and delved into in-to it beyond the limit of the others in the great realms of nature and literature liter-ature that we had begun to enjoy together to-gether when they were little children. Each one could therefore make his own particular contribution to the delight de-light of all. Pool rooms, saloons, clubs, stag parties? par-ties? When' will short-sighted, self-indulgent, arrogant fathers learn that in their own .wives and children are the possibilities of perennial delights and solid satisfactions compared with which other filings are dust and ashes? |