STILL ALIVE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 220, 17 September 1938, Page 13

STILL ALIVE.

DISCOVERY THRILL.

CHILDREN AT MUSEUM.

UNUSUAL WAYS OF TEACHING.

Even in a world =o thoroughly charted as ours the thrill of discovery is daily being experienced. In science, medicine, aviation, industry. fresh ground is being broken all the time.

But there is no need to look only into specialised spheres of life to find that the tfirill of discovery still exists. Have you ever watched children in a iruseum? Have you ever read the story of amazement, excitement and joy in their shining eyes and shrill, wondering talk?

It is this thrill of coming upon undreamed-of things that educationists put down as the most striking reaction in the minds of boys and girls from city and country schools who visit t lie Auckland War Memorial Museum at the rate of nearly 1000 a month. II is a reaction that follows naturally from the systemised method of study which this thoroughly up-to-date educational development affords. Practically from the time they enter through the wide portals of the museum the onus of teaching shifts from the teachers in charge of the classes to the children themselves. Serious Arguments.

It would not be the same, a« the museum's education officer. Mr. R. A. .Scobie, explains, if the children were merely assembled in the formal way and

"talked at" by their teacher while he hekl up exhibits to illustrate his lecture. Reaction of the class would then tend towards the opposite extreme, expressed in a disinterested shrug of the shoulders.

Almost any day of the week, however, you can see little groups of children clustered around exhibit cases in the museum. \ou can hear them raising their voices in serious argument over some disputed point, then hear their expressions change to delighted agreement with someone who hits on the right answer. Often the teacher is nowhere in sight. I hat scene is an illustration of the principle of self-study that is a fundamental working rule in the museum's educational activities, which now have a regular place in the curricula of many schools. The stiff, formal lectures of your own school days have been left in the past; talking, supplemented by the showing of films and lantern slides, today serves chiefly in providing a background for the subject about to be studied.

Here is an example: A class has come to the museum to study the bird life of New Zealand. Usually, unless this has been done earlier in the school itself, a brief but adequate illustrated explanation is given of the native bush in which the birds have their homes. This is the background needed to make later study more clear. Left to Themselves. Then the group of children moves away to the hall of New Zealand bird life, and to the section of the hall which concerns them for the moment. There they are left almost to themselves. I hey take notes, make sketches, and are often armed with a series of questions, to which they must find the answers. These questionnaires, by the way, are frequently carried back to the schoolroom and lead to the subject being threshed out all over again.

It is generally not until after the children have made their own search that Mr. Scobie or the teacher appears on the scene again—this time to face a barrage of questions that often spring from the most unexpected sources. Mr. Scobie finds he is many times required to elucidate on points which would probably be overlooked in a formal lecture. Practical Application. The lesson does not end when the children leave the museum after their stay of an hour or so. It is taken up again in the schoolrooms, and many of the discoveries made are put to practical use. Mr. Scobie showed a reporter two workable rotating drills fashioned by boys from the observations they had made in the Maori section of the institution. So interested in the museum do the children become when they acquire the technique of studying the exhibits, he also points out, that many of them come back again on Saturdays and Sundays.

Country children, too, are making use of the facilities thus provided. Small rural schools sometimes join forces to make a visit to the museum possible. Parents come along as well, and make a day of it.

But the visits of echool classes by no means comprise the whole of the museum's educational activities. Materials and cases of exhibits are passed from school to school; children's animal, bird and pottery clubs pay frequent calls to seek help in solving their problems (there are clubs, too, directly connected with the museum), and young naturalist* in country districts send in "bugs" and plants for identification. A series of six Saturday morning film sessions was successfully begun last week.

And a fine goal in all this work is seen by Mr. Scobie. It gives the child a true conception of ttie values that are otherwise hidden from him under the sophistication and complication of the world.