The city authorities had erected a new, attractive, and roomy building for the school, and now placed at its head Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), already widely known for his book “The Education of Man” (1826), and Heinrich Langethal (1792-1879) and Wilhelm Middendorf (1793-1853), who had been associated with Froebel for fourteen years in his school in the Thuringian village of Keilhau and after the few years in Burgdorf were again to be his helpers when the first kindergarten was opened at Blankenburg, another Thuringian town. All three had been members of Lützow’s Free Corps during the War of Liberation, and through residence in Berlin had come under the influence of Jahn and his work on the Hasenheide Turnplatz. Spiess found these colleagues ready to coöperate with him at every step, and all worked together in perfect harmony to give the broadest possible training to the children under their care. The open-air gymnasium, originally laid out after the Jahn plan in 1824, and beautifully situated in a grove near the left bank of the Emme, overlooked to the east by wooded sandstone cliffs beyond the stream and on the west by an ancient castle, was now doubled in size and entirely refitted in accordance with the wishes of the new teacher. In the castle itself, where Pestalozzi had conducted his school for five years (1799-1804) and written “How Gertrude Teaches Her Children” (1801), a hall was equipped for winter use. In the spring of 1834 the boys of the school, including even the youngest, began to receive systematic instruction in gymnastics for two successive hours on three afternoons of each week, and before long the interest of the girls, also, was awakened and special classes were formed and suitable exercises devised to meet their needs. There were frequent excursions on foot into the surrounding country, and once a year, in the autumn, an exhibition or _Turnfest_ was held. The new discipline, which reached pupils of both sexes and all ages, was regarded as an essential part of their school training. [Illustration: FIG. 22.—The original Spiess _Turnplatz_ at Burgdorf, in the grove between the Emme and the Castle.] It was not long before the attention of the cantonal school authorities was attracted to the Burgdorf experiment, and as a result Spiess received in 1835 the added appointment of teacher of gymnastics in the normal school (_Landschullehrer-Seminar_) at Münchenbuchsee, ten miles to the southwest, where in addition to eighty children in the model school he found about a hundred pupils. He also undertook a similar task at various other schools in the neighborhood, among them one for girls in Kirchberg, and for his own pleasure and further training joined a small gymnastic society of adults (_Männerturnverein_) in Burgdorf, visited the Turners in Bern and Hofwyl, and attended the annual Swiss _Turnfeste_ held in Bern (1839), Basel (1841), and Zurich (1842).