[Illustration: Photograph by Brown Bros. A school garden. The possibilities for good through school-garden work are numberless]
School gardens are perhaps already too familiar to require more than a word. Their possibilities for good are numberless. In them many children get their first insight into the joys of making things grow and are led by this joy to undertake the care of a home garden and to beautify the home surroundings as they had never thought of doing before. School-garden work leads to beautifying the school grounds, with resulting pride and interest in the school.
Accompanying the activities we have suggested, teachers will find a wide field in attractive stories of helpful coöperative home life. Extracts from many of Miss Alcott's stories, the Cratchits' Christmas dinner from Dickens' _Christmas Carol_, and many other delightful glimpses of home life can be read, or, better, dramatized, with little effort and with good results.
It may seem that the homemaking training here suggested for younger children is too desultory, too slight, in fact, to affect the situation much. But let us consider. Homemaking is an art, coming more and more to be based on a foundation of science. For it is undoubtedly true that, while the pessimists are telling us that the home is doomed, we who are optimists see coming toward us a great wave of homemaking knowledge which if seized upon will put the homemaker's art upon a surer foundation than it has ever been.
The elements of housekeeping are the _ABC_ of homemaking. We shall do well to teach them early, incidentally, and with no undue exaggeration of their place in the scheme of living. We simply familiarize the girl, by long and quiet contact, with the tools of the homemaker, for future scientific use, just as we teach the multiplication facts for later use in the science of mathematics.
A definite list of the simple homemaking tasks suitable for little girls to undertake may not be out of place here:
1. Setting the table. (A card list of table necessities is useful. Such a list may be given each little girl when she undertakes home practice work.) 2. Clearing the table. 3. Washing the dishes. 4. Sweeping the kitchen. Sweeping the piazza. 5. Dusting. 6. Making beds and caring for bedrooms. 7. Arranging her own bureau drawers and closets. 8. Simple cooking. 9. Hemming towels and table linen. 10. Ironing handkerchiefs and napkins.