112 NATURE STUDY KEJIEIV [9 :4— April, 1913 



root and blossom, and from outlines the pupils wrote some fine 

 papers. Some of the plants studied successfully were the violet, 

 dandelion, jack-in-the-pulpit, buttercup and wild-strawberry. 

 These furnish a nice variety. I give here the outline we used 

 for the dandelion : 



Dandelion. 



I. Where and when found? (a) Soil. 



II. Root (Fleshy, long, many feeders. Why this kind?) 



III. Plant (Stemless). (a) Leaves — (1) number, (3) ar- 

 rangement (in circle to keep space from year to year, and allow 

 much sunshine), (3) shape (notched to crowd grass away) ; 

 (b) Blossom (closed on rainy days) — (1) stem, (2) color of 

 flower, (3) perfume, (4) number on each plant (as many as 

 200) ; (c) Seed — (1) appearance of seed ball, (2) seed carriers. 



lY. Use of plant, (a) Greens and salad (food), (b) medi- 

 cine, (c) no use to animals; great pest, hard to kill. 



The readers furnish many poems on our common wild flow- 

 ers which we saved and studied when w^e could have the real 

 flowers at hand. One opening exercise was a general talk on 

 grasses. I had given a short list and asked the children to make 

 it as complete as they could, naming all the common varieties in 

 the neighborhood. We not only discussed the valuable ones, but 

 the pests as well. 



The return of the birds naturally furnished some more de- 

 lightful oral and written language lessons. The third grade 

 made bird booklets and decorated the covers with free-hand pa- 

 per cuttings of birds. They wrote descriptions of common birds 

 and copied a few choice poems and verses. One story that they 

 especially liked was the story of Louise Alcott when she wrote 

 her first poem, "To A Robin." The booklets were illustrated 

 with miniature bird pictures in colors. 



In the fall we continued our work along these same lines. 

 We collected and kept in one corner of the school room the 

 seeds and fruits of all the plants in the neighborhood. Not mere- 

 ly the fruits of our fruit trees, but fruits of every weed, wild 

 flower, farm crop, or tree. The result was surprising. No one 

 even supposed that the witchhazel, teazel, wild ground cherry, 

 black osier, false Solomon's seal, dog-berries and many others 

 lived any nearer to us than in the land of storv books. Some of 

 the brightest pupils did not even know that wild roses had beau- 

 tiful shiny hips or that pine cones had little winged seeds. 



People in the district helped in the collecting until quite a 



