events, whether school credit be given or not, the stimulus
of interest in home tasks may be given strength by the teacher's wise
suggestion, and thoughtful consideration of the matter in teachers'
and mothers' meetings will insure cooeperation of the most helpful
sort. The tactful teacher will find ways to suggest to mothers that
children be held up at home to the ideals of efficiency she has been
at pains to put before them at school.

The suggestion has been recently made by several thoughtful educators
that the noon hour, in schools where children do not go home for
dinner, be made use of for the simplest of cooking lessons. The
children who at seven are quite content to play house soon pass into
the stage where they wish to see results from their work. They want to
"make things," real things, that they or some one can use. Children of
nine or ten can learn to cook cereals and eggs in various ways, to
make cocoa, and to prepare other simple dishes. Their pride and
delight in these accomplishments are intense. These activities are
equally suited to the small rural school and to the consolidated
schools which are happily taking the place of the one-room buildings.
In both, the teacher may find the lunch hour a real educational force
if it is used aright. If the teacher allows and guides these efforts
in the schoolroom, she must keep in mind her "ideal of efficiency."
Accurate measurements, logical processes, elimination of awkward and
unnecessary movements, care in following directions, neatness, and
precision are the real lessons to be learned.

[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 cooeperative 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 c