The Child's Day Part 12

II. HEARING AND LISTENING. 1. Have you ever slept in a house close to a railway? What did you notice whenever a heavy train went by? What made the bed tremble? 2. If you have stood very near a moving train, how did your ears feel? Why? 3. How far do sound waves travel after they enter the ear? Could a person be deaf who had two perfect ears?

Where would the trouble be? 4. Draw a picture to show the parts of your _left_ ear, and name each part. 5. How do you take care of your ears? 6. Comment on doing each of these things:--firing a bean shooter at anyone; throwing gravel or sand; firing off a cap or torpedo close to some one's head; boxing a person on the ear; running a nail cleaner or pencil point into your ear; putting on the baby's cap so that the ears are folded forward; asking your teacher to repeat her question.

7. Have you tried to train your ears? How?--and why? 8. Find out about some business, or occupation, in which it is necessary to have very keen hearing, and write a little story about it.

III. SEEING AND READING. 1. Are you seated now in the best way for reading or not? Why? 2. Why is it well to look up often, as you read?

3. How far from your eyes ought you to be able to hold this book to read it easily? If you cannot, what should you do? 4. Draw a picture of someone's eye, as you see it, naming the parts. 5. Draw a picture of your eye as it would look if you could see the eyeball from the _left_ side, and name the parts. 6. What takes the sight message to the brain? 7. How does the nerve of the eye (the _optic nerve_) get its messages? What, then, is _light_? If the light waves enter the ear, can they make you hear? Why not? 8. When a baby is born, what care should be taken of its eyes immediately, and why? 9. Have you ever played any games in which the sharpest eyes won? What were they?

10. Write a little story about the picture on p. 59.

IV. A DRINK OF WATER. 1. Why do we want to drink water? How would you know that your body must have a great deal of liquid in it? 2. Do you know where the water you drink at school comes from? If you don't, try to find out; and find out also just how it is brought to the school and why it flows up to the faucets. 3. If you get drinking water from a well, either at home or at school, tell where this well is--how near the house or the out-buildings. Do you think that any waste from these buildings could drain into the well? Why? 4. At your sand table or from a sandpile in the yard, lay out a farmyard, showing where the house, the barn, the chicken yard, and the pig-sty, also the privy vault, are. Now locate the well so that it cannot receive drainage from any of these places. 5. What is the danger in using drinking water from a stream? 6. How could the germs of typhoid fever get into the milk we drink? 7. What do we mean by _fermented_ drinks? Name some. What is in these drinks that is so very harmful?

V. LITTLE COOKS. 1. Do you bring luncheon to school? What do you like to have for your luncheon? Talk about this in cla.s.s with your teacher, and find out what things are best for school luncheons. 2. How is your luncheon packed? Why ought it to be neatly done? 3. How long do you take for luncheon, or for dinner at home? Is this time enough? 4. What do you do right after eating? Is this what you ought to do? Why? 5.

What foods do you know how to cook? Write out the recipe for something you have made, showing what you mixed and how you did it; and in what, and how long, you cooked it. 6. Give three reasons for cooking food.

7. How is fried food so often made indigestible? 8. Are sweet foods good or harmful? What does sugar come from? How is it made? 9. Write a little story about one of these things: My First Lesson in Cooking; Our Taffy Party; How I Kept Flies out of the Kitchen; How We Boys Cooked Breakfast (or Supper); My Marketing.

VI. TASTING AND SMELLING. 1. If anyone asked you how a lemon tastes, what would you say? What would you say about sugar? Salt? Pepper?

Pickles? Strawberries? Cheese? Onions? Radishes? How did you learn about each of these? 2. What does your tongue do besides receiving tastes? Note in the picture (p. 86) how strongly your tongue is rooted; point to the tip of it in the picture. 3. How does your nose help your throat and your lungs? How else may it help you? 4. Draw a picture to show how air reaches the lungs. 5. What are _adenoids_? How may you know if you have adenoids? If you have, what ought you to do?

Why? 6. Where do the men who want to smoke in the open trolley car have to sit? Why? If children breathe tobacco smoke, what effect will it have on them? Why is smoking a foolish habit? How is it often harmful?

VII. TALKING AND RECITING. 1. When you are reciting in cla.s.s, do you think how your voice and the words sound to the other people in the room? Show the cla.s.s how you can make your speech sound just as you want it to. 2. Give three ways in which you can take care of your throat and voice. Put your hand on the place where your voice is made.

How is it made? 3. On your own picture of the throat, show where those little folds of skin are (the picture on p. 86 shows, of course, only the fold of skin, or _vocal cord_, on the right half of the windpipe).

VIII. THINKING AND ANSWERING. 1. With two or three of your cla.s.smates, play telephone;--one must be "Central" and one "Information" at the central office, and one must receive your message and answer it. A number of the other children may join hands to make a long "wire" on each side of "Central"; they will repeat the message softly from one to another all down their "wire." 2. Now, suppose that you all represent the telephone system in the body. Could you act out this "Body-Telephone" call:--The eye sees a burning match on the floor, and sends the message to its center in the brain; this center consults the memory ("Information") as to what to do. Memory recalls that burning matches are likely to set fire to other things and ought to be put out. So the brain sends a message to the muscles of the foot to get to work and stamp out the flame. In this play, what will you each call yourselves? 3. Make up some other "Body-Telephone" plays. 4. What are some of the messages that are being carried by your nerves, that you know nothing about? 5. Think how many messages a baby stores away before he is ready to answer them; what are some of these? Why can he not answer them at once? What makes his brain and nerves and muscles grow? How can you take the best care of yours? 6. In the picture on p.

96, point to the brain; to the spinal cord. How near the surface of your back is your spinal cord? What keeps it from being easily injured?

"ABSENT TO-DAY?"

I. KEEPING WELL. 1. Why do our bodies need "housecleaning"? How do we get rid of the waste part that is a gas? Of the part that is water?

What carries the carbon dioxid to the lungs? What carries the waste water to the sweat tubes and the kidneys? What other waste is there to be gotten rid of? 2. Suppose that you and your chum each have an equal chance to take a bad cold from someone else; your chum catches it, and you don't. What might be one reason why you don't? Place your hand over your liver. How can you keep it in good working order? 3. What is the bladder? Why is it so very necessary to empty the bladder regularly? When you perspire freely, how does that help the kidneys?

II. SOME FOES TO FIGHT. 1. You have seen moldy bread? What is, the mold? What makes it spread? 2. Suppose you take some pieces of moldy bread or potato and turn a gla.s.s jar or bowl over them. Catch a few flies and put them under the gla.s.s, and leave them to crawl over the moldy food. After a day, put the flies under another gla.s.s with some pieces of fresh bread or potato. If you find that the fresh food quickly becomes moldy, how will you think that the mold germs came to it? (If you keep the jars in a warm place, the germs will grow faster, and you won't have so long to wait before you can see the mold.) 3.

What other kinds of germs do flies carry? How do they carry them? 4. A Board of Health caused a liveryman to be fined because he allowed a manure pile to remain behind his stable. Why was his act a misdemeanor? From what do flies come, and how do they grow? 5. On your way to and from school, what have you noticed that could breed or attract flies? How could these things have been avoided? 6. The next time you go into a butcher shop or grocery store, notice how the things are kept and be ready to tell the cla.s.s what you think about it. 7. In what ways may germs be carried, besides by flies? 8. What do we mean by the "Great White Plague"? Why is it called this? What are people doing to try to cure it? 9. What can you do to help prevent it?

10. Why ought you to stay away from other people when you have a cold?

What do you need most in order to get well? 11. Do you always have your own towel to use? Why should you? 12. Write a little story about the picture on p. 112.

III. PROTECTING OUR FRIENDS. 1. Is there a Board of Health in your town? If not, what takes its place? See if you can find out some of the things that the Board or the Officers have done for the town. 2.

What do we mean by _quarantine_? What is the _quarantine station_ in ports where pa.s.senger steamers land? See if you can find out about any time when a city or port was guarding its people against an infectious disease. 3. Have you been vaccinated? How was it done? Why was it done? How do we all know that it is a very wise thing to have done? 4.

How can you help the Health Officers to keep your town a healthful place?

WORK AND PLAY

I. GROWING STRONG. 1. When you play out of doors, what do you exercise? What do you exercise when you study? How ought you to play and study so as to get the most good from each? Why is it good to play, and work too, out of doors? 2. What games have you played in the last day or two? How did the players divide the muscle exercise of the game? Did they divide up the thinking part, too? 3. Why must the blood be sent to the muscles? Why must it be carried away again? When you feel tired, what is happening in your body? 4. What are muscles like?

Show how the elastic bands of your legs work when you sit on your heels. What makes the muscles at the back of your legs feel thicker?

5. What bones of your body can you feel? Put your hands on them, as you tell what you can about each. 6. Why do we need bones? What do we call our whole framework of bones? 7. Have you ever seen anyone who had to stay all the time in bed or sit in a wheeled chair? How did this person show the lack of exercise? 8. What is the meaning of the picture on p. 129? 9. Choose one of the other pictures in this chapter and write a story about it to show how to grow strong.

II. ACCIDENTS. 1. When you hear the word _accident_, what do you think of? What have you to help you to prevent accidents? If you have used your "look-out department" as well as you can, and still the accident happens, what will you do then? 2. Show the cla.s.s how to care for a very deep cut. What do we call a medicine that kills disease germs? 3.

How would you treat a bruise? A burn? Frost-bitten ears? Chilblains? A bee sting? 4. If you are told to take some medicine from a certain bottle or box, do you always look at the label? Why is it dangerous not to? What do you think of having medicines about not labeled or poured into old bottles with wrong labels? 5. If you should happen to swallow something poisonous, what ought you to do right away? 6.

Suppose your clothes or your hair should catch fire; what would you do? 7. How did you celebrate last Fourth of July? Write a short story about the picture on p. 144. 8. With one of your cla.s.smates, show how you would try to restore a person who had just been saved from drowning. How can you try to save yourself if you fall into the water?

III. THE CITY BEAUTIFUL. 1. Have you a park near your home? When the people leave at the end of the day, how do the lawns and paths look?

Are there cans in the park to hold the papers and sc.r.a.ps? 2. How are the streets in your town cleaned in winter? In summer? 3. How do the houses get rid of their waste? 4. If the waste goes into a river, is the river water used for drinking? Who decides where the drinking water for the town shall come from? 5. Why are drinks containing alcohol harmful to take (give four reasons)? What is a _narcotic_? How does drinking alcohol lead to crime? 6. Write down five ways in which you can help to keep your town or city beautiful. Five ways in which you can help to keep your own home beautiful. 7. Why should every city have parks for the children?

THE EVENING MEAL

1. Play housekeeping, and order the dinner. 2. Write down a list of things for a good supper. 3. Why does Nature give us so many different kinds of food? How does she teach us not to eat too much of one kind at a time? 4. Write down on the board as many of each of these kinds of food as you can:--meats; vegetables; fruits; breads; sweet foods; fish; grains; food (not fruit) that does not need cooking; food to drink. 5. How do you help to make meal times pleasant? Make up a story about the picture on p. 159, and tell it in cla.s.s.

A PLEASANT EVENING

1. Just after a meal, what is your stomach doing? How can you help your digestion? 2. Have you played any of the games mentioned here?

How did you play them? 3. Look at the picture on p. 165; why is this a good after-supper corner? How do you sit and hold your book when you read in the evening? 4. What parts of your body are you exercising and taking care of when you read? Of what use is a healthy, vigorous body without a healthy, vigorous mind? How can you keep your mind healthy?

How can you keep it vigorous? 5. What kind of books do you like best to read? Tell the cla.s.s the names of some good ones.

GOOD NIGHT

I. GETTING READY FOR BED. 1. At what hour do you go to bed? When do you get up? How many hours' sleep does this give you? Is this enough?

Why do you need so much sleep? 2. As you undress, what do you do with the clothes you take off? Why should you air your clothes every night?

How can you take an air bath? Is this as good as a wash? 3. How do you care for your hair at night? 4. Do you ever go to bed without brus.h.i.+ng your teeth? If you do, what happens all night long to the food sc.r.a.ps that were left around and between your teeth? As these sc.r.a.ps decay, what harm do they do? What makes a tooth ache? 5. Draw a little picture of your own teeth as you see them in a looking-gla.s.s. Are there any s.p.a.ces that you can see where food might lodge and stay? How can you keep your teeth quite free from sc.r.a.ps of food? 6. Why are teeth necessary? How must they grow to make good cutting tools? If they are not straight or sound, what can you do about it? 7. Why ought children's first teeth to be thoroughly brushed every day?

II. THE LAND OF NOD. 1. When you are ready for bed, how do you fix your windows? Why is it even more necessary to have the air blowing through the room at night than in the daytime? 2. How else is your body being purified at night? Does your body do any work while you are sleeping? What work? 3. What kind of sleep should you have if you are perfectly well?