contains modelling clay, the raw material of such objets d'art as may be seen decorating the mantlepiece in the cut on page 20.

A place for everything.

THE INDOOR SAND BOX

The indoor Sand Box pictured here was designed by Mrs. Hutchinson for use in the nursery at Stony Ford. A box of this kind is ideal for the enclosed porch or terrace and a great resource in rainy weather.

The usual kindergarten sand table cannot provide the same play opportunity that is afforded by a floor box, but it presents fewer problems to the housekeeper and is always a valuable adjunct to indoor equipment.

THE CARPENTER BENCH

The carpenter equipment must be a "sure-enough business affair," and the tools real tools--not toys.

The Sheldon bench shown here is a real bench in every particular except size. The tool list is as follows:

Manual training hammer.
18 point cross-cut saw.
9 point rip saw.
Large screw driver, wooden handle.
Small screw driver.
Nail puller.
Stanley smooth-plane, No. 3.
Bench hook.
Brace and set of twist bits.
Manual training rule.
Steel rule.
Tri square.
Utility box--with assorted nails, screws, etc.
Combination India oil stone.
Oil can.
Small hatchet.

Choice of lumber must be determined partly by the viewpoint of the adult concerned, largely by the laboratory budget, and finally by the supply locally available. Excellent results have sometimes been achieved where only boxes from the grocery and left-over pieces from the carpenter shop have been provided. Such rough lumber affords good experience in manipulation, and its use may help to establish habits of adapting materials as we find them to the purposes we have in hand. This is the natural attack of childhood, and it should be fostered, for children can lose it and come to feel that specially prepared materials are essential, and a consequent limitation to ingenuity and initiative can thus be established.

On the other hand, some projects and certain stages of experience are best served by a supply of good regulation stock. Boards of soft pine, white wood, bass wood, or cypress in thicknesses of ¼", 3/8", ½" and 7/8" are especially well adapted for children's work, and "stock strips" ¼" and ½" thick and 2" and 3" wide lend themselves to many purposes.

TOYS

The proper basis of selection for toys is their efficiency as toys, that is:

They must be suggestive of play and made for play.

They should be selected in relation to each other.

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 interest may be led to activities outside the home life.

They should be durable because they are the realities of a child's world and deserve the dignity of good workmanship.

Children re-create the world as they see it with the equipment they have at hand

FLOOR GAMES

"There comes back to me the memory of an enormous room with its ceiling going up to heaven.... It is the floor I think of chiefly, over the oilcloth of which, assumed to be land, spread towns and villages and forts of wooden bricks ... the cracks and spaces of the floor and the bare brown "surround" were the water channels and open sea of that continent of mine....

"Justice has never been done to bricks and soldiers by those who write about toys--my bricks and my soldiers were my perpetual drama. I recall an incessant variety of interests. There was the mystery and charm of the complicated buildings one could make, with long passages and steps and windows through which one could peep into their intricacies, and by means of slips of card one could make slanting ways in them, and send marbles rolling from top to base and thence out into the hold of a waiting ship.... And there was commerce; the shops and markets and storerooms full of nasturtium seed, thrift seed, lupin beans and such-like provender from the garden; such stuff one stored in match boxes and pill boxes or packed in sacks of old glove fingers tied up with thread and sent off by wagons along the great military road to the beleaguered fortress on the Indian frontier beyond the worn places that were dismal swamps....

"I find this empire of the floor much more vivid in my memory now than many of the owners of the skirts and legs and boots that went gingerly across its territories."

H. G. Wells, "The New Machiavelli," Chapter 2.

The unsocial novice

Nowhere else, perhaps, not even in his "Floor Games" and "Little Wars" has Mr. Wells, or any other author succeeded in drawing so convincing a picture of the possibilities of constructive play as is to be found in those pages, all too brief, in "The New Machiavelli" where the play laboratory at Bromstead is described. One can imagine the eager boy who played there looking back across the years strong in the conviction that it could not have been improved, and yet the picture of a child at solitary play is not, after all, the ideal picture. Our laboratory, while it must accommodate the unsocial novice and make provision for individual enterprise at all ages and stages, must he above all the place where the give and take of group play will develop