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Show REPORT OF SUPERINTENDENT OF INDIAN SCHOOLS. 399 -- . . and that only in the crudest way. All of the schools have cooks, but few of them have a teacher of cooking, and the girls can ain little practical knowledge of the details of famdy cooking merelygby assist-mg in the kitchens of the lar e boarding schools, where the work is conducted on too large a scaf e for them to learn to prepare simple family meals, use a small stove, build and manage a fire, make bread, or plan and cook wholesome meals at a small cost. The class-room teachers in a number of schools have been ur ed to give the pupils preliminary and elementary instruction m coo%mg on a small scale, m the same manner as is done in many ublic schools, that they may be better able to profit by the racticaY work in the school kitchen. To this end a series of detailed kections and graded sample lessons, correlatin cooking with language and number work, are being pre-pared an fi put in shape for sending shortly to the field. In the meantime letters have been written to superintendents urging that more attention be given to this subject, and from one of these the following is quoted The O5ce comiders in.itruotion in cooking and general housework of paramount im or tmca, snd each girl should receive suffioient training to enable her upon leaving sohodi to prepare me& for r m U fam ily and t&e complete charge of the household work. In visit-mng returned students it has been observed that many of them heve not received sufficient tr-g dong this line. If you can make some arrangement by which all the @Is can he kive? instruction in f-1y cooking, especially with reference to the prepmation of meals, ~t d l be of the greatest assists,noe to them in taking up the respomibilities of the home. Your cooperstion with the 05% in its efforts to improve this branch of Indian school work will be greatly apprecisted. NECESSITY FOR INCREASING THE NUMBER OF DAY SCHOOLS. In view of the irn ortant work of the day schools in familiarizing the Indian child wit% school routine, giving him a working know!.- e d r of En&h and even preliminary trammg in agriculture and other in ustries, it is beheved that their number should be greatly increased. On some reservations the Indians are too scattered to make the estab-lishment of day schools feasible, but in many localities they live in sufficient roximity to justify providing such schools; for example, on the Nava f o, White Mountain Apache and Crow reservations. There are large numbers of children on these reservations who do not have adequate facilities, and the establishment of a number of these ele-schools should not be delayed. The ndi.a n mother's unwillingness to be parted from her children sometimes makes it difficult, as you are aware, to induce her to give them up for the time necessary to cover a term at the boarding school; but she; ordinarily makes no objection to their attending the day school on the reservation, knowing that the will come home to her each evening. Having become accustome i" to the absence of the children for portions of a day, the parents are more easily induced later to permt them to go to the near-bJ boardin f school. On the Pine Ridge Reservation 29 ay schoo s have been estab-lished. The average attendance at each of these is about 25, making a total of 725. This, in connection with the pupils at the boarding school and the mission school, together with those who have been sent to the nonreservation training schools, shows that practically every child of school age on this reservation, unless incapacitated by |
