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040 _aUtSlPG
041 7 _aen
_2iso639-1
050 4 _aQH
100 1 _aComstock, Anna Botsford,
_d1854-1930
245 1 0 _aHandbook of nature-study for teachers and parents
264 1 _aSalt Lake City, UT :
_bProject Gutenberg,
_c2026
300 _a1 online resource :
_bmultiple file formats
336 _atext
_btxt
_2rdacontent
337 _acomputer
_bc
_2rdamedia
338 _aonline resource
_bcr
_2rdacarrier
500 _aRelease date is 2026-03-08
508 _aCarol Brown, Aaron Adrignola and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
520 _a"Handbook of nature-study for teachers and parents" by Anna Botsford Comstock is an educational handbook written in the early 20th century. It offers a comprehensive, field-centered approach to teaching nature-study, combining philosophy, method, and abundant lesson material on animals, plants, and earth and sky for teachers and parents. The work emphasizes direct observation, outdoor exploration, and joyful curiosity over rote facts or drill. The opening of the book recounts how a Cornell-led nature-study movement arose from concerns about rural life and agriculture, developed through school experiments, children’s clubs, and widely distributed leaflets, and culminated in this volume that rewrites and expands those materials for broader use. Comstock explains her aim to support untrained teachers with a two-part lesson method (a “teacher’s story” plus guided observations), an informal style, and a focus on biological topics suited to everyday fieldwork. She lays out practical guidance on when and how to teach, the value of saying “I do not know,” the role of lenses and museum specimens, humane attitudes toward life and death, and keeping field notebooks and organizing excursions. She also shows how nature-study enriches language, drawing, geography, history, and arithmetic, clarifies its relation to gardening and agriculture, and encourages student clubs, before advising how to use the book. The section then turns to “Animal Life,” beginning bird study with the familiar hen and a first lesson on feathers as weatherproof clothing, modeling how to move from recognition to understanding what birds do. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
534 _pOriginally published:
_cIthaca: Comstock Publishing Company, 1911
653 _aNature study
856 4 _uhttps://archive.org/details/handbookofnature1916coms/
856 4 0 _uhttps://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78142
999 _c118862
_d118862