shallow sand box, perhaps five feet square, with sides six inches high,
and completely lined with enamel cloth to make it watertight, is a
wonderful implement for constructive play on the part of the child.
Whole villages of farms, fields, and forests, ponds and brooks, roads
and railroads, can be made here in miniature.

Building blocks of wood or stone; the metal construction toy called
"Mechano"; dolls, doll houses, furniture, and equipment, are valuable,
but they should be simple, inexpensive and not fragile.

Cut-up picture puzzles, painting books, tracing slates with large and
simple designs cultivate observation and ingenuity. Kaleidoscopes and
stereoscopes are excellent, but moving pictures are so trying upon the
eyes, and the air of the theaters is so bad, that a deaf child whose
eyes are his only salvation, and whose health is doubly important,
should not even know of their existence till he is seven or eight years
old.




VIII

FURTHER TESTS OF HEARING


But, as soon as the mother finds her little child sufficiently mature to
benefit by the sense training described above, whether it be at twenty
or, as is more likely, at from twenty-four to thirty months, she can
begin to make a more complete and accurate determination of the degree