70 
REPORT OF THE CURATOR OF ELEMENTARY 
INSTRUCTION FOR 1926 
Dr. C. Stuart GaGceER, DIRECTOR. 
Sir: I hereby present to you the fourteenth annual report from 
the Department of Elementary Instruction. 
During the year 1926 this Department came into educational 
contact, through its various activities, with over 400,000 children; 
held 1,145 sessions of classes and lecture periods; placed 34,- 
712 living plants in the schools; distributed 550,840 packets of 
seeds to school children; and supplied more nature material to the 
schools than in previous years. These are the high spots statisti- 
cally in our work with the schools. 
A number of requests have come to us this year for assistance 
in starting children’s garden work in other places. In May, les- 
sons in our methods were given to a representative of Madame 
Vitelli’s Industrial School in Torre del Greco, Italy. The Brook- 
lyn Botanic Garden donated American seeds for this little garden. 
The Department helped start a garden for children at the Brook- 
lyn Home for Consumptives under the patronage of the Brooklyn 
Branch of the National Plant, Flower and Fruit Guild. This 
work was continued throughout part of the summer. Our plans 
for children’s gardening were sent by request to the Practice 
School in Sydney, Australia; School of Horticulture, Ambler, 
Pennsylvania; Board of Public Recreation, Stamford, Connecticut. 
Some of the Curator’s time during the spring and fall was used 
for lecture work in connection with our endowment campaign to 
bring it before the Mothers’ Clubs and schools of our borough. 
It might be of interest to state here that the children of our own 
garden made the first contribution to this fund, and that the largest 
contribution from any one organization was made by the Garden 
Teachers’ Association. Former students of the children’s depart- 
ment met at the laboratory building in November and formed a 
temporary organization to facilitate the raising of their contribu- 
tion to the fund. 
The children’s outdoor garden progressed along its regular 
lines. A list of plants in the Shakespeare Garden was published 
