With its unfamiliar terms to be committed to memory and the many parts of the flower to be distinguished, botany is apt to prove dry and tiresome to the little child, but to study nature by copying the flowers in this marvellously adaptable material is only a beautiful game which every child, and indeed many grown people, will delight in. The form of the flower, its name and color, may, by this means, be indelibly stamped upon the memory, and a good foundation laid for further study.
The Best Models
Ordinary garden flowers and those most easily procured make the best models. The carnation, the morning-glory, and the rarer blossoms of the hibiscus are well adapted to the work, also the daffodil and some of the wonderful orchids.
Even holly, with its sharp-spiked leaves and scarlet berries, and the white-berried, pale green mistletoe may be closely copied. All these and many more are made on the same principle, and in so simple a manner that even quite a little child may succeed in producing very good copies from nature.
Material
Buy a sheet of light pink tissue-paper, another of darker pink, and one of the darkest red you can find; then a sheet of light yellow-green and one of dark green. Have a table "cleared for the action" and place your paper on the right-hand side, adding a pair of scissors and a spool of coarse thread, or, better still, of soft darning cotton.
With all this you are to copy the
Carnation
which some one has given you or you have growing in your own garden. Make one of your light pink paper, one of the darker pink, and another of the rich, deep red to have a variety ([Fig. 225]).