72 NATURE-STUDY REVIEW 



just as we learn to know any other object. I believe it is most 

 important that the garden material be as familiar to the child as 

 the materials he uses in basketry, cookery, woodwork, or 

 any other subject in the school curriculum. When I was connected 

 with the Rochester City Normal School, this early spring work 

 used to form a basis for arithmetic, drawing, spelling, and language, 

 just as it should. I would have all during the spring, bottles of 

 seeds in the classrooms, experiments performed in germination, 

 so that the children might know about the number of days it would 

 take before the different seeds come popping up in the garden 

 under ordinary conditions. In order that children may expe- 

 rience a feeling of the right depth in planting, I use a flat and 

 the classes plant a model garden. The flat is about one-tenth of 

 the size of the outdoor garden bed so that the boys and girls who 

 are ready for problems in arithmetic, work this out quite carefully. 

 The others merely take their directions and the little model garden 

 is planted in exactly the same way in which the outdoor garden will 

 be planted. We can get in this way the exact depth and spacing 

 in ratio to the size of the bed. The older boys and girls make 

 their own plans drawn to scale. Another piece of work which was 

 done in the upper grades in Rochester was that of the older boys 

 and girls in making large plans, one for each classroom and putting 

 in the area which was to go to a given class in red pencil, so that 

 Grade Four saw not only the plan of the whole school garden, but its 

 own area set off in color. Unless the garden is to be a vital real 

 thing in the school work no time should be given to it. That is 

 why it is so important and essential to have the right teachers. 

 We would not choose a woman to teach singing because she 

 happened to have just a liking for singing, but no training. We 

 would not choose a man for manual training because his grandfather 

 had happened to be a carpenter. When all superintendents of 

 schools and all principals of schools in our country insist whenever 

 they have a nature-study teacher on having a trained one, not 

 only trained in the subject, but trained in general education, 

 then there will be no question concerning the place of nature- 

 study in our schools. 



We are sometimes criticized here at our Garden for being too 

 fussy, too particular about little things. I wonder if that could 

 possibly be true ! Does not all the difference in good work and poor 



