Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III PLAN OF THE BUILDINGS In planning the buildings for an outdoor Nursery- School, we have to think of three, perhaps even of four stages of childhood. Early childhood ends at seven, that great milestone noted by the leaders of all great races and religions, and now by those who tell us that brain-growth stops here. During the great war, when the grant was paid by the Ministry of Munitions, we did not let go the tiny hand of the infant of days, or toss it away when the little traveller was two, three, or even five years old. Though the Bill says three to five, we will not think merely of one or other of its stages, but of childhood as a period of existence ending at seven. Otherwise we are not students at all, and are like mothers who care for their children at one age, but ignore them at another ! Childhood is a time of change, of swift transformation. As an infant a little one sleeps much. As a toddler he wants to run and range all over a large place. At three or four he has become another person, with new needs and desires, and later still he is a schoolboy. That is why we haveto plan so that the children do not interfere too much with each other's lives, while at the same time these lives are not isolated or wrenched apart one from the others. They should meet often as in a family, in the gardens, at playtime, in visits to each other's shelters, and even at other times. In planning the shelters we have to think about the weather also. It is not a fearsome thing to dwell on ! The best health records of the open-air nursery are always in winter, in January not in June ; in fog and frost and rain we have the cleanest bill of health. " Nature never does betray the heart that trusts in her," even in winter. Still this trusting does not mean that we are to expos...