Manual training teachers generally believe that good school instruction in the manual arts stimulates in the pupils the desire to do construction work out of school, but very few teachers have attempted to direct and develop such outside work. They have often encouraged pupils to bring home projects into the school, but they have seldom differentiated between problems especially adapted to school work and those which are preeminently home problems. Yet such a differentiation is practicable and it suggests a broadening of the teacher's influence and the enrichment of the handwork of the pupils.

Sometimes the manual training teacher has been striving to stimulate pupils to spontaneous effort in school when he would have done better to have held the pupils down to organized, systematic work in the school and reserved the spontaneous work for home problems. But even the wisest teacher, in order to insure the greatest value in such home work, must give his pupils encouragement and suggestions. Sometimes he must even supply the motive to effort.

It is this point of view with reference to home work that has led Charles M. Miller of Los Angeles, California, to develop kite-making and organize the annual kite tournament which has been so remarkably successful during the past three years. Mr. Miller does not claim that kite-making is an especially good form of work for the school shop, but he does consider it an excellent form of "home occupation work," as he likes to call it. It has furnished him a means of stimulating spontaneous effort in his pupils and has opened the way to a large field of similar work.

The completeness of the success of the kite tournament is shown by the following statement made by Dr. E. C. Moore, Superintendent of Public Schools, Los Angeles:

I regard our kite day as the best school undertaking that we have. It is a splendid institution, and nothing that we do calls forth more inventiveness, more skill, and more of the spirit of clean sport. Mr. C. M. Miller, who started it here, has invented something which may be used to advantage by every school department in the land. Kite Day is a school festival which we all look forward to and which, when it comes, is enjoyed by thousands of adults as well as thousands of children.

To enable other teachers and supervisors to profit by the data Mr. Miller has used with such success, we present his article published in theManual Training Magazine, Volume X, Number 3, as the first number of the Manual Training Reprints. To this article Mr. Miller has added suggestions to teachers concerning the kite tournament, and we have appended his account of the tournament of 1909 just as it appeared in the Manual Training Magazine.

August 10, 1909.

- The Editor.

A Tournament Winner.

Fig. G.