aves of Cincinnati's parks half shadow the activity
of the busy classes of little kindergarten folks who go there to work
and to learn. The Park Commissioners, like every one else in Cincinnati,
are in thorough sympathy with the work of the schools, so they allot to
each kindergarten class a plot in the park, in which the children--using
all of the tools themselves--plant tulip bulbs under the direction of
the park gardeners.

"Tulips are the first thing up in the spring," Miss Both well explained,
"so we have decided to use them. For years we tried gardens, but
children of kindergarten age are not willing to give gardens as much
attention as they require; then, too, the gardens ran wild during the
summer, so we have settled on the tulip. After the children have planted
the bulbs they sing and talk about their work. Then, early in the
spring, they begin to visit their plots, watching the first shoots of
green as they appear, looking eagerly for the buds, and then, at last,
as the reward of their interest, picking the flowers and taking them
home. Thus, each child, during his kindergarten course, sees the
complete cycle from bulb to flower."

Besides this flower-culture in the park, the children grow hyacinths in
the school rooms, visit the woods to collect autumn leaves and spring
flowers, make excursions to the country, where they may see animals and
crops, and always, for a few days after an excursion, talk about the
things which they saw, draw them, sing about them and play games about
them. In order to facilitate the work the Board of Education leases a
farm, to which the kindergartens go in succession. By these means the
life of the city kindergarten child is thoroughly linked with nature.

These things are not new in kindergartening, however. They have merely
taken firm root in the fertile soil of Cincinnati's educational
enthusiasm. The real excellence of Miss Bothwell's experiment consists
in connecting the kindergarten with the early elementary grades on the
one hand and with the community on the other.

The first grade children of Cincinnati come back to the kindergarten
teachers for an hour's kindergartening once each week, in order to
clinch the kindergarten influence on the lives of the first graders. The
first grade teachers meet the director of kindergartening once each
week, for a discussion of kindergarten methods, and an initiation into
the kindergarten spirit. Thus the lump of first grade abstracti