Climate Makes a Difference

For an illustration of effects of climate on curriculum, look at the region of southern California. It is warm most of the year. In the schoolhouse flowers in the windows do not freeze. Pets can be kept in classrooms. Gardens grow during school months, not in spring and summer only, as in more northern regions.

One October the third grade in a school of this region arranged for a garden plot, which they thought they could use to raise vegetables for the school cafeteria. With the garden as one of their curriculum projects, the boys and girls found they had the problems of irrigating, contour plowing, and fertilizing the soil. Highschool seniors were consulted for advice. The children studied ways and costs of irrigating their particular kind of land. They learned about the kind of contour plowing that was best for the slope on which their garden plot lay. They tested soil by scientific methods and decided what kind of fertilizer was needed. An eighth-grade boy and his father plowed the land with a tractor and spread the fertilizer. Several mothers contributed seed. Radishes, chard, kale, onions, turnips, carrots, beets, and lettuce were cultivated.

Along with learning about their garden, eight of the children wanted to learn more about poultry-raising. These boys and girls, also in October, set three duck eggs under a hen, and, a week later, three hen eggs. Only one of the duck eggs hatched. Donald was the name the children chose for their fluffy new pet. Donald became the inspiration for experimentation with diets, not only for ducks, but for children.

The boys and girls considered the value of cleanliness and sanitary conditions in raising poultry. They discussed the hatching of eggs; how to feed baby chicks, older chicks, and young fryers; the importance to poultry of fresh clean water. They learned the value of eggs as food for boys and girls.

All year the garden and poultry were studied and cared for. Records of expenses and returns were kept. Letters were written, reports prepared. Neighbors were consulted. In March, a dinner was prepared for the entire school. The main foods were fried chicken and a mixed green salad from the garden. A short program consisted of stories about the project and brief accounts of things accomplished.

The foregoing activity, centered on gardening, is only one example of an experience in which climate makes a difference. Climate often makes a difference in part of the children's recreation, in their experiences in selecting and buying clothes, in the

industries carried on in their home community, in their camping and outdoor experiences, in their conservation activities. In these fields the teacher looks for leads to help the children select the activities that will mean most to them.

Arts and Handicrafts of Communities

Some schools are recognizing the value of art and handicrafts in child and community-centered curriculums. To help children realize the most from these activities, teachers first learn what type of art or handicraft may be a part of the cultural background of the people. Teachers in rural regions will find the bulletin, Rural Handicrafts in the United States, to be a rich source of ideas. City schools often draw on the cultural background of the neighborhoods from which the pupils come and use local museums and galleries to extend their pupils' appreciation and knowledge of art productions.

A Chicago school in a certain neighborhood of Mexican-American families, for example, capitalized on the children's artistic abilities, and on the handwork and other relics and articles in the homes. As a result, the children did more attractive painting and hand work. They gained poise because they felt their own and their parents' abilities were appreciated.

Other schools use local materials. A third grade in a country school in North Carolina, for example, collected large pine cones and made decorative turkeys with sticks for legs, necks, and heads, and brown paper spread to look like feathers. The children took them home and they were used for table decorations at Thanksgiving.

A pupil in another school in the same vicinity used clay found near her home in modeling figures and objects which she saw around her or heard or read about. Through use of this local material for expressing a personal interest, this student developed artistic skill. She later did some outstanding work with clay.

The Gulfport Elementary School, St. Petersburg, Fla., at its summer day camp made use of the resources of the environment in art experiences. For example:

Seeds were used in making lapel pins.

Pine needles were used in making pin trays and baskets.

Shells were useful in making jewelry, animals, handkerchief holders, and shade pulls.

7 Eaton, Allen, and Crile, Lucinda. Rural Handicrafts in the United States. Washington, U. S. Government Printing Office, 1946. (U. S. Department of Agriculture, Miscellaneous Publication No. 610.). 40 p.

Seaweeds were dyed and used in making shell pictures.
Pine cones were made into home decorations.

In North Carolina, woolen and cotton industries encourage people who are interested in handweaving. They prepare handdyed wool and cotton yarns which individual weavers can buy. From them handbags, cushion tops, wall hangings, draperies, and coverlets are made at home. Adults, young people, and children enjoy working with designs or copying antique designs for baby blankets, couch spreads, neckties, and the like.

The handicrafts of the Southern Highlands, which, as Allen Eaton puts it, comprise that "vast and for so long isolated region of the Appalachian Mountains which begins with the Virginias and extends into Northern Georgia and Alabama," have promise for schools.8

We live near Pennsylvania Dutch. This is a sample of our handicraft.

A simple plea which Eaton makes reveals sufficient reason for handicrafts in the schools of these people, or in the schools of any other people with similar resources. He says:

He who does creative work, whether he dwell in a palace or in a hut, has in his house a window through which he may look out upon some of life's finest scenes. If his work be a handicraft he will be especially Eaton, Allen H. Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands. New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 1937. p. 29.

happy, for it will help him not only to perceive much of the beauty of the world about him but, what is man's greatest privilege, to identify himself with it. If it enables him to earn his daily bread then he should rejoice, for blessed is the man who has found his work; but if, as will be the case of many in our day, his handicraft is not a way of making a living, but through self-expression a help toward a fuller life, he too will rejoice, for he has all the privileges of his fellow-craftsmen without the need of fitting his product into the market.

Nor is Southern Highlands region the only place with the natural and human resources for a program of handicrafts. Many places have local and national groups with a background of handicraft skill on which the school might well capitalize. In New York are Italian, Swedish, Polish, and Chinese neighborhoods. In Chicago are Italian, Mexican, and other groups. In San Francisco are Chinese, Japanese, and Mexicans. In San Antonio are Mexican and other Spanish-speaking peoples. In southern Colorado are Spanish-speaking and Indian people with skill in weaving and dyeing wool. In New England, the West, the Southwest, and other regions, Indians have interesting handicrafts.

One way to get the most out of artistic effort is to deal practically with the art of everyday life. Art is meaningful when related to the place where the children live. Thus, boys and girls can use their artistic efforts to express their feelings about something that really affects them and to improve life around them. They can have more beautiful rooms, homes, and yards; more attractive architecture in the houses of the community; beauty in the things they buy-such as garments, utensils, and furnishings. In art activities, regions as well as ancestry and culture help determine the effect of art on everyday living.

Local Industries

Curriculums are often different because of local industries. Sometimes the difference arises from ways of living that are characteristic of low-income families forced to live in the neighborhood of factories or mines. Some of the basic considerations for teachers in understanding different economic groups are brought out in publications of the National Council for the Social Studies.10 Schools are trying to help children understand prob

See Art Bibliography (Ed. Arthur R. Young). New York, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1947.

92 p.

Magazine of Art, 22 East 60th Street, New York, N. Y. See especially the issue entitled

Guide to Art Films.

10 Examples are: Cummings, Howard H. (ed.). Improving Human Relations. National Council for the Social Studies Bulletin No. 25, 1949 and Taba, Hilda and Van Til, William. Democratic Human Relations. Sixteenth Yearbook of the National Council for the Social Studies, 1945. Both are published by the National Council for the Social Studies, Washington, D. C.

lems which arise and to work out what simple home and community improvements they can.

Understanding and fundamental improvement are often achieved by high schools, as described in the publications referred to. Elementary schools attack their problems objectively and simply, yet as directly as high schools, and as much in keeping with the needs of the boys and girls and the neighborhood in which they live.

In one of the elementary schools of Cambridge, Ohio, for example, classes of boys and girls studied the industries in which their fathers or mothers were employed, some of which were located in the neighborhood of the school. When a bond issue for new school buildings was to be voted on recently, boys and girls in a junior high school made lists of voters in the district and planned ways of helping parents be free to go to the polls, sometimes baby sitting, sometimes helping with house chores. The children in this way learned techniques of community work. They became acquainted with people. They learned first-hand about one of the ways in which their community brought about improvement.

A more formal study which drew on local industries and was influenced by them was a study of tools and machines of Rockford, Ill. Rockford is one of our industrial cities, and many of the children's parents are employed by its factories. It was natural for the children first to make a study of their fathers' and mothers' jobs. They visited those factories where children were allowed, observed the tools and machines with which their fathers and mothers worked, and looked at the tools which were made. Since not all of the children visited the same factory, groups of children worked out ways of letting other groups know what had been learned. Posters, sketches, stories, and snapshots were used to tell the stories to other groups in this school.

Questions arose about the way people ever got along without the things made. The children turned to books to get information about the effect of the industrial revolution on American ways of life. They asked their parents to tell them how things had changed within their lifetime. To these children the study was valuable because it reached into their lives. It took advantage of things going on in the community to help them learn. It gave their parents opportunity to help.

A school in a New Jersey dairy region near New York City made a study of dairying in the community and in other communi