TEACHERS’ NUMBER 
BROOKLYN BOTANIC GARDEN 
LEAFLETS 
THE BROOKLYN INSTITUTE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES 
Series III Brooklyn, N. Y., October 6, 1915. Number 9 
TALKS FOR ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CLASSES 
A list of talks open to elementary school classes was printed 
by The Brooklyn Botanic Garden last April. These talks were 
planned to correlate with the subject matter in the city syllabus 
for nature study and geography. Many public school classes 
came to the Garden during the spring; some came in small groups 
with teachers for a demonstration lesson or one in the greenhouse; 
others came in larger groups for lantern slide talks and trips 
through the greenhouses. Usually about one hundred children 
comprised the larger groups. Such a group represented an entire 
class, that is the A and B sections of one grade. 
We are handicapped at present at the Garden by the small 
size of our lecture room in which only about fifty children can be 
comfortable during a lantern slide talk. So when one hundred 
boys and girls come, fifty attend the lecture, while the other fifty 
in two groups of twenty-five each with an instructor in charge go 
through the greenhouses. The economic house is filled with 
those plants which we read of in the geography and usually only 
see in pictures. Here is the big banana plant, little coffee trees, 
the tea plant, rubber plants, bamboo, and even bull-rushes under 
which one small boy looked for Moses himself. This house 
might mean much more to the classes than it ever has. It would 
be advisable, for example, for the children to bring their note 
books and pencils and make a real business of this little journey 
through the sub-tropics. 
The following list of talks is our second list. We have 
again graded the subjects, but any of these talks will be given to 
any grade upon request. The listing is made to show the correla- 
tion with the present syllabus, as mentioned before. 
