62 NATURE-STUDY REVIEW [11:2— Feb., 1915 



the regular school garden teacher. Most of the produce is sold 

 to the parents of the children. Not only the children who work in 

 the garden but all the children arc buyers. Just because vege- 

 tables are raised at school they want to buy them. In the fall 

 the material from the gardens forms the basis of the nature work 

 and botany work. 



The garden money is used to buy bulbs, seeds and plants for 

 the next year. Among the plants bought this year were four 

 currant bushes and six grape vines. These were placed in the 

 Jefferson school garden which is a small garden. We already have 

 a good sized asparagus bed. Our idea is to teach the children 

 how to plant and care for, not only the commoner kind of vege- 

 tables but also those which will save their parents the most money 

 if grown at home. 



The daily auditorium hour has a definite place in the Gary 

 school system. The auditorium hour furnishes an opportunity 

 for producing a kind of work which cannot be done as effectively 

 in the class room. The majority of the children are very anxious 

 to take part in the auditorium work. After one has given a series 

 of lessons on a subject, one can give the same lesson to a limited 

 group on the stage. The lesson given in the auditorium will be 

 a review but at the same time it will be so dressed up and embel- 

 lished that it will not bore them like an ordinary review. When 

 children can talk before an audience of two or three hundred they 

 are surely well grounded in their work. 



The auditorium work is usually an outgrowth of the class work. 

 During the year I have given work for this period on moths, butter- 

 flies, rabbits, pigeons, chickens, galls, stars, snow, seed dispersal 

 and illustrated talks on flies and birds. 



With the older children we have experiments showing why 

 we have day and night, the rotation of the earth about the moon 

 and the sun about the earth, and on the capillarity of the soil. 

 We also have days devoted to the study of nature poets and nature 

 poetry. It is an incentive to children to learn poetry when they 

 know they will be allowed to recite it later in the auditorium. 



During our application periods we have an opportunity to 

 develop along different lines. The botany teachers in the schools 

 which have high school departments and nature teachers in the 

 other buildings have charge of the school grounds. We can then 



