A gracious lady who presides over the kindergarten of the Lebanese Women's League speaks on an important and engaging subject, to which we direct the attention of parents and of educators, women and men alike.
(1) In one of the remote corners of the kindergarten garden there grew an evergreen plant which we call in the vernacular "kuzbarat al-bir," and the children rarely gave
it their attention. One day Usama was seen cutting some of it and bunching it in his hand. The teacher called him and asked him why he was breaking the strict orders to protect the flowers and not to pick them. He answered shyly: "My mother loves these green leaves; we always used to gather them together when we were in the mountains and decorate our house with them. But since I came down to Beirut I have seen them nowhere but here, and I wanted to surprise Mama with a bouquet of them, to see how great her joy would be." The children thought the teacher would punish him and take his little bouquet from him for having committed a forbidden act, but she did nothing of the kind; rather she praised him before his classmates and honored in him this feeling for beauty and this appreciation of it, and let him carry his gift to his mother... And this story acquainted her
with Usama's mother before she ever met her: she proved to be an artistic lady, who cares for the beauty of her house and attaches importance to the arranging of flowers on the dining table and in the various rooms. It is only natural that such a lady should have a child like Usama.
(2) In one of the handicraft lessons an experiment was carried out on a large number of children in sorting colored beads and arranging them according to the harmony of their colors, and it was established that the best result was the work of Usama and children like him. It became clear that there is a great connection with children's appreciation of flowers, their love of colors, and their understanding of them. For their keen interest in flowers and their observation of the colors of nature
refine their visual taste and strengthen in them the instinct for harmony, so that they find distasteful in colors every clash which others might see as something beautiful — and is there any artist like nature in displaying the flowers of the gardens and the harmony of their colors?
(3) In the drawing lesson the teacher approached one of the children, aged three and a half, as he was filling his sheet from the promptings of his imagination. On the sheet she saw a boat with a sail, beneath it a fish, and in the corner of the sheet another, small boat. Sarmad explained his drawing according to the way he had laid it out, saying: "This is a boat traveling on the sea, and this is a fish swimming under it, and that is a boat very far away from