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50
Visual Education
Seeing and Doing as Elements in Teaching Health
Sibyl Kent Stone Health Expert, New England Dairy and Food Council
WHENEVER I hear the familiar bray, "Times have certainly changed since / was young! The schools aren't what they were in my day !" I murmur piously, "Thank God for that !" Vividly do I remember my own school days. Yet my family had, with prayerful consideratior, selected the best school in a city of good schools.
This autumn, in the capacity of health teacher, I visited between sixty and seventy schools, public and private, with the result that I am again compelled to offer thanks
to the Deity. The spirit of the modern school, with few exceptions, is a revelation. Classrooms are gay with posters ; there are colored drawings on the blackboards, miniature villages on kindergarten sand tables, and — in the upper grades— weight charts, health slogans, lists of gold star students, and so on. In one school I was told that the pupils had presented a petition to have the school year prolonged and summer vacations cut ! Who ever heard, in my young days, o£ children actually enjoying school ?
VISUALIZING THE "IRON" FOODS
The Iron Knight in spinach lives.
And in red apples, too. And thiu these foods red cheeks he gives
To boys and girls like you.
Implanting Health Habits
Perhaps one of the greatest gains in education is the introduction into the curriculum of health work and health ideals. No longer are we content to have our children graduated after a certain period with a prescribed number of certified facts packed into their skulls. The state demands that the children go to school; we demand that they be kept physically and mentally fit while they are there, and that the foundation for intelligent and useful citizenship be laid during this most impressionable period of life.
Nor by "health work" and "health ideals" do we mean hygiene or physiology. We refer to the actual establishment of health habits which are not laid aside when lesson books are closed, but which are definite, easily understood facts to be appropriated and made part of the life of each individual child.
One might think that this addition to the school program would mean an added burden upon already overworked teachers ; but where health work has been intelligently correlated with the already familiar subjects, this has not proved the case. Health songs add zest to the singing lesson; health posters stimulate imagination in drawing; the calculation of weight percentages makes a fascinating game of arithmetic (children are vitally interested in "getting up to weight"), and so on, through the list. Enthusiasm carries many a child over tasks through which he was once pushed or pulled by sheer force of the teacher's will, and to this extent, the latter's work is lightened rather than made heavier.