Things ain't now as they used to be A hundred years ago, When schools were kept in private rooms Above stairs or below; When sturdy boys and rosy girls Romped through the drifted snow, And spelled t^ir duty and their " abs," A hundred years ago.
Those old school-rooms were dark and cold When winter's sun ran low; But darker was the master's frown, A hundred years ago; And high hung up the birchen rod, That all the school might see, Which taught the boys obedience As well as Rule of Three.
Though 'twas but little that they learned, A hundred years ago, Yet what they got they ne'er let slip, - 'Twas well whipped in, you know. But now the times are greatly changed, The rod has had its day, The boys are won by gentle words, And girls by love obey.
The school-house now a palace is, And scholars, kings and queens; They master Algebra and Greek Before they reach their teens. Where once was crying, music sweet Her soothing influence sheds; Ferules are used for beating time, And not for beating heads.
Yes, learning was a ragged boy, A hundred years ago; With six weeks schooling in a year, What could the urchin do? But now he is a full-grown man, And boasts attainments rare; He's got his silver slippers on, And running everywhere.
I have been back to my home again. To the place where I was born; I have heard the wind from the stormy main Go rustling through the corn; I have seen the purple hills once more; I have stood on the rocky coast Where the waves storm inland to the shore; But the thing that touched me most
Was a little leather strap that kept Some school-books, tattered and torn! I sighed, I smiled, I could have wept When I came on them one morn; For I thought of the merry little lad, In the mornings sweet and cool, If weather was good, or weather bad, Going whistling off to school.
My fingers undid the strap again, And I thought how my hand had changed, And half in longing, and half in pain, Backward my memory ranged. There was the grammar I knew so well, - I didn't remember a rule; And the old blue speller, - I used to spell Better than any in school;
And the wonderful geography I've read on the green hill-side, When I've told myself I'd surely see All lands in the world so wide, From the Indian homes in the far, far West, To the mystical Cathay. I have seen them all. But Home is best When the evening shades fall gray.
And there was the old arithmetic, All tattered and stained with tears; I and Jamie and little Dick Were together in by-gone years. Jamie has gone to the better land; And I get now and again, A letter in Dick's bold, ready hand, From some great Western plain.
There wasn't a book, and scarce a page, That hadn't some memory Of days that seemed like a golden age, Of friends I shall no more see. And so I picked up the books again And buckled the strap once more, And brought them over the tossing main; Come, children, and look them o'er.
And there they lie on a little stand Not far from the Holy Book; And his boys and girls with loving care O'er grammar and speller look. He said, " They speak to me, children dear, Of a past without alloy; And the look of Books, in promise clear, Of a future full of joy."
Hurry! hurry! is the rule On the days we go to school. Just as soon as breakfast's done, 'Round about the house we run, Looking here and looking there, Finding things 'most anywhere. Father, walking to and fro, Hurries Jack who's always slow. Mother, glancing at the clock, Smoothes out Mary's rumpled frock; Tells us children to make haste; Says there isn't time to waste; Goes down with us to the gate; Says she hopes we won't be late. Then away we hurry fast, Off to school again at last.
"Normally I share on the children's books that line the shelves in my
classroom, however, I wanted to share a few of the books that have lined
my own shelf these past couple of months. This past winter and spring I
wanted the focus of my professional development (pd) reading to be on
eco-learning (naturalist learning or nature based learning). Here's a
little snapshot of each book that I'd recommend to other educators who
have the same passion and interest" N. Grimm
The Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv. Children
spend less time outdoors in nature more than ever before: Richard Louv
explores the causes that have lead to this nature deficit culture
children live in currently through a great deal of research that he
shares in this award winning book--a must-have for any educator's
bookshelf who wants to cultivate and implement eco-learning in their
classroom and school.
The Nature Connection by Clare Walker Leslie.
If a teacher were ever in need of a resource packed with nature based
lessons and activities, then this ought to be the book to pick up. From
garden planning, to building a nature table, to exploring dirt, The Nature Connection is sure to lay out a wide variety of ideas for the whole year--every season--to choose from to take into your classroom.
Botany on Your Plate: Investigating the Plants We Eat by Katharine D. Barrett. This
book is a great curriculum resource for bringing gardening into your
classroom. We did a lesson out of it this spring that the kids loved on
taste-testing various garden vegetables and collecting data on them.
The Sense of Wonder by Rachel Carson.
Carson weaves together a beautiful narrative, parried with lovely
photographs, of her days exploring outdoors with her young nephew and on
the importance of helping children keep their "inborn sense of wonder"
through nature.
Cabinet of Curiosities: Collecting and Understanding the Wonders of the Natural World by Gordon Grice.
This book shares on the art of collecting the nature treasures that
peek our curiosity or serve as a memento of a memory made--the art of
bringing natural history into your life. I still have nature finds from
my own childhood in a small wooden cabinet on display that remind me of
days spent walking sandy shores or hiking through the Colorado
mountains. The book has a small section on building one's own cabinet of
curiosities and caring for your specimens, with the majority of the
book focused on classifying specimens with the Linneaus system. This
would be a great reference book to have in a class library for older
elementary students to practice classifying specimens and building their
own collection.
And a couple of articles from across the web that resonated with me
while I've been learning more on integrating eco-learning into the
classroom...
Below is an article written in 1919 and although it is very old, the content I feel is appropriate for today's educational environments. The authorship is excellent. The only argument I would bother to make with it is that it underestimates the qualities young children give to inanimate objects that look like themselves. Children will use particular toys like props, thus dramatizing all kinds of scenario through their play with dolls, stuffed animals and puppets.
Also, having a traditional home environment inside of the classroom helps to promote affections in a child's family where they live for twenty some odd years and in some cases even longer than this. It is still very important to reinforce nurturing and care for others through the positive roleplaying children experience at school. Therefore traditional centers with dolls, kitchens, living spaces etc . . . should not be excluded from primary learning environments.
Could there be a better use for a laboratory floor?
The question seems simple. Yet the answers as they are silently expressed in the majority of schools and homes are strangely confused and superficial. For the most part they are based on the idea that play is a waste of time good padding for the early childhood years before real things can begin, and later an interlude between periods of real accomplishment to be tolerated because children will get ill if kept too closely to their books and tasks.
But, as is being more fully recognized each day, this negative assessment of the natural activities of little children is not merely inadequate. It is false. It makes us do wrong things to children. If we really understood play, we would be stirred by the scope of its educational possibilities. One vital aspect of play is the child's duplication or interpretation of the life processes ! going on around him. In their play, children create the world as they see it with the equipment they have at hand. And to them this created world is real real as the artist's; world is to him and in much the same way realer than the adult's world which the adult would force upon him. Play, instead of being a wasted interlude in the learning process, is the process itself.
Every Class room should have a work-bench.
The kindergarten was founded upon play activities as grown people conceived them, and it made a distinction between systematized play and what was termed "free" play. The kindergarten never recognized the latter as a vital part of the educational process. But in the last few years, educators have dimly seen and slowly groped their way toward the fact that play is the child's method of experimenting with his environment. At the same time they have come to realize that experimenting is the soul of education; that much sound knowledge is gained by the trial and error method ; that a child will continue to learn by the same process that he learned to walk by falling down.
When these great, simple facts are appreciated, the problem of school and home assumes an entirely new aspect. How can they be made over into places where children can educate themselves, can learn through experimenting the meaning of the world they live in, and do it by the natural means of play? What must be done to furnish a genuine laboratory for children? What are the necessary appliances with which it should be equipped?
These are searching questions. They send a challenge to nearly everything which has been thought proper in a small child's school surroundings the teacher's attitude, the classroom furniture, and the equipment.
In a little child's laboratory, the teacher becomes an observer of and specialist in play. She does not impose her personality or her methods upon the child. The child's world is his own world. He wishes to interpret that and not another's. The work of the teacher is not to lead him to see her world through his eyes, but to put before his eyes a world which he may make his own. For the child, the stimulus to experiment should come from the observation of the life of the city streets, or the farm, or the home, or whatever his environment happens to be. The teacher should put her energies upon the ordering and simplifying of this larger environment, rather than upon suggestions as to what the child shall do within his laboratory in experimenting with or interpreting this environment. The child's interpretation of his environment is play. No child need be taught it.
Up to the age of six, a child is an individualist.
But if the child himself is to get from this interpretation all that it has to yield, he must be given the very best appliances to express this interpretation. And these appliances are technically "free materials" colloquially, toys.
This word, like play, is burdened by the weight of years of misunderstanding and abuse. Toys have not been treated seriously. They have been regarded as a waste of money or as things to amuse children. With what consequences? What kinds of things have been given as toys? To begin with, boys have been given one kind, girls another. The environment of a brother and sister is the same, and yet, under no condition, has the little girl's interest been allowed to be the same as the boy's. The fact of their sex has been seized upon and emphasized until it has built a Great Wall of China across which a small girl may not venture without fear of being a hoyden, and a small boy, a "sissy." Moreover, the toys have not been toys with which children could do things. A set of tools occasionally came into a small boy's hands and released his pent-up desire to make, to construct. But, for the most part, boy and girl alike were limited to already finished objects which could merely be moved about or watched and not in a real sense played with.
The climax of absurdity in playthings is the so-called "mechanical toy." It does all the work. The child does nothing. Watch a child in front of a mechanical toy say a miller who runs up a ladder and dumps a sack of grain down a chute. It seems to hold much of promise for interpreting a child's surroundings to him. He is fascinated by the first few trips of the miller. He endows the man with human qualities. He names him. Then, after the novelty has gone by, he longs to have his miller do something besides race up and down the ladder at superhuman speed. But the miller has no other possibility. So the toy is finally discarded, or, more probably, dissected by a bored child who wishes to find out how the little man works. The net result is a disappointed donor, an "ungrateful child," and a little heap of unusable rubbish. There exists, to be sure, another type of mechanical toy of which the electric engine is a good example. A toy of this type may be used as the basis of very wonderful constructive play for children old enough to "run it" themselves. But the usual type of mechanical toy should never be classed with toys at all. It is destructive of play.
Again, toys, even good toys, which help a child to duplicate the processes going on around him have never been planned together. They remain separate objects, unrelated units, disjointed bits of the universe, which grown-ups, having forgotten their own play-thoughts, imagine children are interested in. It is difficult to reconstruct a sector of life with a two-foot rag baby, a four-inch wagon and a rocking-horse.
"Free materials" aid him to enter the social world.
Toys real toys are the tools of play. And since play is serious business for children, these tools must be selected with serious intent. The requisite for toys is that they must be efficient as toys. That is, they should be suggestive of play and made for play. They should be selected in relation to each other, both in size and in kind. They should be consistent with the environment of the child who is to use them. They should be constructed simply, so that they may serve as models for other toys to be constructed by the children. They should suggest something besides domestic play, so that the child's interests may be led to activities outside the home life. They should be durable, because they are the realities in a child's world and deserve the dignity of good workmanship.
Toys of this sort may obviously form an equipment for a child's laboratory, and anything which answers these requirements becomes in this sense a toy a tool for play. Some toys of this sort for example, blocks are as old as the proverbial hills; they have even been used in the schoolroom. But to use them as a basis for constructing a miniature world, a world in which the related toys the dolls and the horses live, move, and have their being, an incomplete world which may be supplemented by all sorts of plasticene (modeling clay) and bench-made things (wooden), a world, moreover, which may be decorated to any extent to use blocks in this way is an innovation in education. Yet there is no appliance better suited to a laboratory for play than simple blocks.
Work benches, with real tools, are an essential for the laboratory. The possibility for purposive action which a work-bench holds is literally boundless.
So, too, with play materials, such as crayons, colored papers, plasticene (play-dough) and clay. If children are let alone with paper and pencil, they will quickly learn to use these playthings quite as effectively as they do blocks and dolls. Left to dig out for himself the "soul" of an object and transfer this soul to paper, which is, after all, the true province of art, a child under six may produce something that at first sight seems to our hide-bound imaginations grotesque. But rest assured that this absurdity is based on some reality. He has drawn the essential rather than the object itself. Take the small boy of six who drew airplanes, guns, ships, and then smudged the whole thing with red crayon. When asked what his drawing represented, he said, "Why, that's war. Isn't it a mess?" Or the child who drew a barely perceptible automobile in white crayon because, as he explained, "It's going so fast you can't see it." Or again, the seven-year-old who passed a green crayon lightly over a sheet of paper and placed at the bottom a tiny figure who "thinks he is walking in the grass, but he really is in the bottom of the sea!"
Children fashion almost anything into their dramatic purposes.
If a laboratory is to give each child die full freedom for his own expression, it has to provide not only appliances which he can easily manipulate to his own ends, but physical space and guarantee from interruption as well. The ability of even well-to-do homes to command these last essentials is seriously threatened in these days of congested cities and small apartments. The school's task is no light one. It must see to it that children have the playthings which are the nucleus of a significant life-process known to them through their own experiences; that is, toys which are related and suggestive; that they have at hand materials with which they themselves can supplement these provided toys; and then, that they be given time and space in which to work out their own experiments in their own way. The easiest place for little children to play is on the floor. Why not a school floor? Why not let him construct his little scheme on the floor and then use this scheme to carry out in action whatever miniature dramatic situation he has created? Could there be a better use of a laboratory floor?
It seems obvious that a child turned loose with appropriate appliances appropriate to his ends rather than the teacher's will develop his own method of expression. He will enjoy it, too. For up to the age of six, a child is an extreme individualist. He does not naturally do things co-operatively. There comes a time, however, when he steps from his individualistic into a social world. The school should meet the requirements of his individualistic period and bridge the gap when he begins to be a communistic souL Here again, toys free materials are the school's chief reliance. They adapt themselves to the needs of a project in which a whole group of children spontaneously develop joint floor schemes such as a section of a city with its streets full of autos and carriages, lined with trees, flanked by houses, restaurants with out-door gardens, railroad station with incoming and outgoing traffic, river with wharves and shipping, grocery shop, baker's shop, factories and all the endless array of industrial activities which make up our modern world. This is not a theoretic description. It is the kind of thing that those who work with free materials and comparatively free children constantly see. It is what keeps their courage steady!
Young student building his own world.
But it is all important that a child should not be forced too soon into a social world. He must work his own way gradually from his own concrete interpretation of a special fact or situation to a social interpretation. To socialize a child's entire day implies that he has reached a stable stage where he has something to say which will contribute to the little society of which he is a part, and that he knows how to say it. It is doubtful if many children acquire this stability during "kindergarten age" though the kindergarten practices are based on the assumption that they do.
There are, to be sure, some practical difficulties in devising a schoolroom where little children may have both ample privacy and ample social life, particularly if they work with free material. In one school, the mechanical difficulty has been met by two simple devices. Small, low, and easily handled screens are placed so as to give each child his own isolated space on the floor. Here he is free to follow his own bent to draw, to model, or to construct and develop a miniature dramatic scheme, as he may desire. And when this individual expression is completed and the floor space is needed for common purposes, the screens may be removed. By the other device a small balcony, easily built in any room the additional space needed for co-operative "floor schemes" is secured. This balcony may be too low to let a grown-up pass underneath, but it doubles the space for the children.
Much of the furnishing of a schoolroom, such as screens, folding tables, chairs, rugs, etc., is good dramatic material. And so is what- ever there may be in the way of outdoor apparatus. If children are encouraged to use materials freely, they fashion almost anything into their dramatic purposes. It is their natural attack on life.
But even if it be conceded that free play with appropriate playthings is good for little children, since it may make them resourceful and observant and independent, it does not logically follow that it covers the whole ground that it is a substitute for "lessons" that it gives the child the "tools of learning." Of course, it is obvious that play-schemes may be made an excuse for making children swallow sugar-coated pellets of arithmetic and reading and writing. Devices of this sort to beguile the unsuspecting child have multiplied like weeds in recent classrooms. They are largely responsible for the common suspicion that freedom within a schoolroom must mean either coaxing or license. They are devices, nothing more. And they are a bit unworthy of the situation. It is not that the play of children affords an opportunity to slip in unnoticed something which an adult values, but which the child would repudiate if he were not duped. It is that interpretive play, constructive play, depends in its very essence upon the same relations, whether expressed in human terms or in books, upon which our real world depends. In order to carry on organized life, we find it necessary to use symbols. These symbols have grown up just because they are necessary to facilitate the processes of the world. The same necessity will be felt by the children in any play which reproduces these processes. And the use of symbols will grow up in the same natural way. Children cannot reproduce an environment which implies a number sense without having that number sense; children cannot do exact bench work without measuring; children cannot play store without arithmetic. This is less true of reading
and writing.
It remains to be determined whether this means that reading and writing must be taught formally or that reading and writing are a later necessity for children. Our own experiment in this field seems to indicate that both of these contentions will be found true and that formal reading and writing come as a welcome opportunity at the age of eight or nine to children who have enjoyed a rich preparatory experience of constructive and interpretive play.
Such an experience, while it does not supply the necessary technique, makes definite contributions toward its acquisition and, a fact of greater import, ensures the immediate use of any tool acquired for practical, purposeful ends. Thus the free use of crayons in big sweeps on large sheets of paper, the blackboard, or the floor, gives preliminary skill and confidence in manipulation. Early drawing may contribute by clearing up visual images. Enterprising play and work experiences demand clear and definite oral expression, ever the basis for clear written expression. After an extended period of such preliminary experiences children are ready to put real effort into the mechanics involved. In addition to the acquisition of contributory habits and skills they invariably bring to the situation considerable "picked up" knowledge of technique. Thus equipped they should learn to read through reading, and find no difficulty in using the tool of writing for thought expression.
The problem of reading and writing links itself very closely with the whole problem of the use of books, of stories and verse. The idea of giving children "free material" with which to experiment and to create has rarely been extended to language. Books for children have been like the toys of old to amuse; or like the lessons of old to instruct.
By a small balcony, the additional space needed for co-
operative floor schemes may be secured.
The effort to amuse has produced a literature of fairy tales steeped in the imaginary romance of an imaginary world a world which often confuses a child's thinking and seldom has any significance in understanding the very real romance of the modern world: it has produced the "story of adventure" with its basic appeal to excitement, its familiarity with killing, impossible heroisms and violence of all sorts; it has produced the "animal story," in which the animal leaves both his nature and his habits and masquerades in human form, not uncommonly in human apparel. The effort to instruct children has produced a quite different but hardly more happy literature if indeed it deserves that name at all. Facts chosen by an adult because of his own interest in them, presented to a child without being related to the child's experience, in a form which too often a child cannot perceive such is the stuff of most of our informational books for little children. Readers which constitute most children's introduction to "literature" are pieced together from these two types of stories the amusing and the instructive and cast in a language intended to facilitate the technique of reading and the technique of writing regardless of the effect upon the art of reading or the art of writing. Care for a child's sensitiveness to sound, care for a child's natural play use of words, care for a child's interest in his own experiences and for his method of reaching the remote and the unfamiliar thru the immediate and the personal, care for a child's creative power in language these are not the things that have guided most of the adults who have written the books for little children.
We need a new literature for children. We need stones which recognize the art the play spirit in words and which are cast in patterns which a child is equipped to see and enjoy. We need stories which will start with a child's own experiences and environment and thru following the line of his own inquiries, lead out from his immediate limited surroundings to richer, wider environments. We need parents and schools who will test the stories and verse which they give to their children not by what a child takes in but by what he gives out in stories and verse of his own creating. For create he will, if he is not diverted from his natural bent by some adult conception of what he should enjoy or should know. There is no telling how far the dramatic appeal of a story might carry a child into genuine scientific habits of thinking. There is no telling thru what new forms of play expression, of "literature," he might express himself, if language were to him "free material" suitable for play purposes. Not till we have this new literature will we have anything like a well-equipped laboratory for our little children. Committee on toys and school equipment, 1919
I've included this video because it will hopefully inspire all teachers in different types of environments to pursue teaching children how to love learning. I am not trying to promote Montessori schools over all other alternatives here. Both of my adult children attended private and public schools during their childhood. None of these schools were Montessori. However, the teaching philosophies of their classroom teachers made a heavy impact on their personal growth. The most important value passed onto my children from those who cared daily for them in school was a love for learning.
Handwashing with soap is among the most effective and inexpensive ways to prevent diarrheal diseases and pneumonia, which together are responsible for the majority of child deaths. This behavior is projected to become a significant contribution to meeting the Millennium Development Goal of reducing deaths among children under the age of five by two-thirds by 2015. October 15 has been appointed to become Global Handwashing Day in accordance with year 2008 as the International Year of Sanitation by the United Nations.
Hands often act as vectors that carry disease-causing pathogens from person to person, either through direct contact or indirectly via surfaces. Humans can spread bacteria by touching other people's hand, hair, nose, and face. Hands that have been in contact with human or animal feces, bodily fluids like nasal excretions, and contaminated foods or water can transport bacteria, viruses and parasites to unwitting hosts. Hand washing with soap works by interrupting the transmission of disease.
Washing hands with water alone is significantly less effective than washing hands with soap in terms of removing germs.
Although using soap in hand washing breaks down the grease and dirt
that carry most germs, using soap also means additional time consumed
during the massaging, rubbing, and friction to dislodge them from
fingertips, and between the fingers, in comparison with just using water
for handwashing. Effective hand-washing with soap takes 8 – 15 seconds, followed by thorough rinsing with running water.
This video makes hand hygiene fun for young children. Sara tells the story about Germy the Germ and how to wash him away so you dont get sick. The video includes colourful animations and simple sing-along songs.
When is it most important to clean your hands?
Before and after meals and snacks
Before caring for young children
After touching a public surface
Before and after preparing food, especially raw meat, poultry, or seafood
Parents, a bloodborne pathogen is a infectious,
disease-causing microorganism that may be transferred through body
fluids such as: blood, urine, saliva, semen, vaginal fluids, or sweat.
Art teachers and their students can contract a variety of diseases from
bloodborne pathogens in the classroom because of the everyday use of
sharp instruments like x-acto knifes, needles, and razor blades. Even though we do not use these instruments anywhere near our preschoolers, we have been informed about the risks involved. To be better informed yourself read and watch a video here.
The school lunch is the problem. It is a subject over which mothers are waxing warm in the mothers' clubs, over which doctors are theorizing, over which teachers are fretting. It is the question of the hour in hygienic circles; and all the while the innocent little tummy accepts what is offered it, never realizing that the school lunch is disturbing grown-up heads.
What shall young America carry in the school lunch basket?
In the first place, doctors have firmly agreed that it shall not carry the lunch basket at all if it is a possible thing to reach home in time for a warm lunch. The cold lunch is an indigestible affair at best compared with a bowl of hot soup or a plate of steaming stew or rare steak. But what can't be made of a bad thing is worth while.
There seems to be a vast difference between the cold lunch that is and the cold lunch that ought to be.
Pickles and ice cream make a popular combination. You can get 5 cents' worth of pickles, chemically vinegared. You can get 5 cents' worth of ice cream at the little store next door, where they sell candy and prize packages and chewing gum and striped lead pencils. You can buy all of these if your money holds out.
Miss Casey, principal of the Lafayette Primary School, says that she has seen this sort of thing happen many a time, sometimes in her own school and more often she has known of it in other schools when the bakeries and the candy shops were nearer. Children are started off to school without a lunch. It is too far to go home. So paper or mamma hands out a little money and says, "Buy your lunch."
Twelve o'clock has come at Redding Primary,
by Stanford
Perhaps the amount is only a nickel or perhaps it is much larger. The more the worse in many cases. As soon as the bell has rung and the lines have passed out the proud possessor of the cost races down the street to the nearest attractive shop.
Maybe there is a beautiful pink cake in the window with little shells of frosting all around the edge and jelly in the cracks. Maybe the loaf costs two bits and maybe the luncher has just that amount. It takes less then two minutes to own the cake and not much longer to shove it down. Here endeth the lunch and likewise here beginneth the dyspepsia.
Or maybe it is a pie that tempts, a lemon pie, brave with billows of meringue. Heaven help young American when this is the sum total of its lunch.
Miss Casey says that she has seen a little tot that possessed just one nickel spend it for candy and make an entire meal on the purchase. It is like the things that little girls and boys wish for in day dreams, but it is not hygienic.
Mrs. Walker, principal of the Marshall Primary School, says: "I wish we could see the school lunch basket containing bread and jelly and good, sensible sandwiches made of lamb, roast beef or corned beef. It ought to have a bottle of milk instead of coffee. Plenty of fruit should be in it. And no cakes--none whatever. This matter of the school lunch is worth thinking about."
All the principals and the doctors seem to say the same thing about coffee and milk. Off with the former, on with the latter. Although Miss Deane of the Redding Primary finds that her flock is inclined to the milk tipple for the most part. "On the whole they seem to bring sensible things," she says. "Sandwiches, milk and fruit are the chief articles."
Mrs. M. M. Murphy of the Irving Scott Primary School says: "It isn't so much what is put up for the children as how it is put up that I want to find fault with. For instance, they have meat sandwiches, which sounds well enough, but some of them are enough to frighten any appetite just to look at them. Great chunks of bread on each side of an ungainly chunk of meat. Ugh! I don't see how the poor little things eat them. I know I couldn't touch a crumb of them."
Dr. Mary Page Campbell was asked to discuss the ideal school lunch from the physician's standpoint and this is what she said:
"It's hard to talk about the ideal basket lunch when there is nothing ideal about such a meal. Every child should go home to lunch. This is the sort of thing, however, that is a waste of breath to talk about and I am practical enough to realize that. Many children live so far from home that they cannot possibly get home, eat and return in the time allowed. Or if they do they will have to bolt the meal so rapidly that it is worse than a cold lunch.
"In Boston the problem has been solved, or partially so, by the little lunch stations near the school buildings where soup is sold to the children for so small a sum that it is possible to all. It is good, wholesome, steaming hot soup that does the little bodies good from top to toe. This furnishes the heat which nature craves in a meal, and cold adjuncts can be carried in a basket.
"Some day I hope to see a kettle of good soup raising a hearty steam within sight of every San Francisco school. But until that comes about we must face the problem as it stands. Hundreds of our children carry a cold lunch to school.
"What shall the basket contain?
"In the first place, there should be something to drink with the meal, and this something should be milk. A bottle of fresh milk can easily be put up in the morning. It is far less trouble than coffee because there is no cooking about it. Let the bottle of cold coffee be tabooed. It is absolutely unwholesome. If the child has acquired a liking for it, then the taste is unwholesome and should be overcome.
"Let the basis of the lunch be bread and butter and sandwiches. Cut the bread thin and spread it thinly. There is a great deal in putting up a lunch daintily. Perhaps it does seem as if children are willing to eat anything, they are so much more the gourmand and less the gourmet than their parents. But nevertheless they are affected by the way their food is prepared. Their appetite will be keener and the benefit from the food greater if it is tempting instead of mussy.
"The sandwiches may be made of good, tender meat; of cheese, or of nuts. Cheese and nuts contain an immense amount of condensed nourishment. If the little folks care for it there is not the least harm in letting them have a pickle, but it must be a good pickle; not one of the ordinary grocery store kind, put up in some kind of chemical vinegar, but one that you know is to be seasoned with pure spices and pure vinegar.
"Now for the lunch basket cup. This cup (or, better yet a jelly glass with a tightly fitted cover) may be made the charm of the basket, for it may reveal a delightful surprise every day to tempt the young appetite. Don't say that it is too much bother to think up new dainties. Set your wits to work. The result will pay.
"Different forms of sage, rice and tapioca can be put into the little glass jar. These may be the simplest and wholesomest puddings, slightly sweetened. They are full of nourishment and palatable as well.
"Macaroni is another idea for your cup. It may be cooked with either tomatoes or cheese.
A little meat pie, with a light, flaky crust, is delicious and wholesome, too. When the youngster carries this he won't need meat sandwiches. Bread and butter is enough. Try to make the parts of the lunch harmonize in this way, just as much as if you were preparing a menu for guests.
"Mayonnaise is an article that I sometimes hear people speaking of as too rich for children. It is nothing of the kind. What could be more valuable than eggs and olive oil? Don't be so afraid of foods of this kind-- the children are not inclined to eat any great amount of them if left to their own devices. Mayonnaise is good on many kinds of sandwiches, but it is better to let the child carry it in a little cup and spread it when noon arrives, as it soaks into the bread if it stands long, becoming unpalatable.
"Children need sweets for fuel. Remember that every morning when you pack the basket. The sweets should be furnished in very moderate quantities, but they should not be forgotten or condemned. A slice of light sponge cake or a few simple cookies are best. With the cake should be plenty of fruit, and so you have a good dessert.
Bear in mind the value of a varied bill of fare. This involves much thought, but it is entirely possible. A cold lunch is at best, less cheerful than a meal at a table. Do your best to brighten the basket by frequent novelties. And wrap each article separately so that flavors won't mix and make an unappetizing mess of the whole." San Francisco Call, April 19, 1903
These school buses were painted by my kindergarten students during my student teaching. The project actually included two parts. First the children were taught to draw "balloon people" before cutting them out to paste onto their school bus paintings. I'll include a link to that exercise when I have posted here. For now, enjoy all of the sweet little orange school bus paintings.
Devid Pelham designs fun pop-up books for children.
This little lunch box by Pelham is a cherished artifact from my eldest child's book collection.
The pages are all intact and in excellent condition considering how much she enjoyed the book as a child. I plan to develop a couple of art lesson plans inspired by the lunch box in the near future. This book will be a real treat to share with my students.
I've also included below another book by David Pelham called, "The Senstional SamBurger"
More in: http://librospopup.blogspot.com/ Book in the Form of a Hamburger The Sensational SamBurger Incredible and unusual POP-UP Book in the Form of a Hamburger By David Pelham Dutton Children's books 1995 Printed and hand-assembled in Colombia Increíble e inusual libro pop-up en forma de hamburguesa
