A Graded Course of Garden Work and 

 Nature-Study 



Roland W. Guss 



Director of School of Gardening, Cincinnati 



Much school-garden work has been too "hit or miss," too "rule 

 of thumb," too much alike in all grades. Much nature-study, 

 beside being open to the last objection, has been allowed to 

 evaporate in sentiment because not tied to the doing of worth- 

 while things in a way adapted to bringing worth while results. 



Once upon a time a school-garden instructor approached a 

 little girl who was holding up her empty seed packets and ex- 

 claiming with satisfaction "They're all planted!" "What's 

 planted'" asked the teacher. "O," said the child, looking 

 over the packages, "radish and cucumber and lettuce and beets 

 and corn and nasturtiums and tomatoes and morning glory" 

 and so on. "Where?" said the teacher. "O, there!" pointing 

 to the little "bed", two by four, carefully raised almost a foot 

 above the paths on which the child had lavished more pains than 

 on the planting, "they're all in there!" 



That was in the early days when gardening zeal "spilled over" 

 on the soil in the springtime, as sap from the maple trees, and 

 then simmered away in the summer sun leaving thicker and 

 thicker the crop of — weeds. Why? Because the garden guid- 

 ance and the accompanying nature-study course, if there was 

 any, was too much like the little girl's garden, or like the car- 

 penter's bench above which hung the motto, "A place for every- 

 thing and everything in it." 



Perhaps what is needed is not less sentiment but more sense 

 and more system, the kind of system which makes much of the 

 nature-study prepare for and grow out of "doing things" in "con- 

 tact with Mother Earth." With Hodge, I believe that thus, in 

 the care and study of pets, in animal industry, and in gardening 

 "at last nature-study has come to its own." 



The course which follows is an attempt so to grade the garden 

 lessons and to correlate the nature-study that each may help the 

 other to educate the children through activities suited to their 

 capacities and interests at different ages. It was worked out, 

 jointly with Mr. Roy L. Smith, at the Massachusetts State 

 Normal School at North Adams, used in part at the Mark Hop- 

 kins Training School, and revised since by the writer. 



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