Page:The Educational Screen - Volume 1.djvu/29

An understanding of the life of the Norwegian people no longer depends merely upon verbal description and chance comprehension. From the north, where a Laplander family is seen in their dress of skins and furs, with their sod house as a background, in company with their dogs and reindeer as pets and beasts of burden to the coastal fishing villages and the more southern hay-fields, where the frugal Norwegian by painstaking labor, makes his little field yield for his support, the child enters for a little time into the actual atmosphere of Scandinavian life.

The location of Norwegian cities close to the coast is seen to be not a matter of chance but determined by uncompromising geographical conditions. For example, a slide of Bergen shows the city to be crowded on a narrow piece of lowland along the shore at the head of a fiord-bay, in front of a rocky hinterland. Nor is it without shock that the child may sometimes find points of similarity between the appearance of his own surroundings and that of a country which, because he never saw it, he is apt to think of as remote and somehow different. A view of a city street in Christiania caused one seventh grader to exclaim involuntarily, “Why, it looks modern!”

With a pictorial background, how much more enthusiastically will the child approach the printed page, what increased understanding and insight he will bring to its study, and how clear-cut we may expect his conclusions to be when he finds that the statements in his text tally with the results of his own observation.

N. B.—The slides used in this lesson were selected from the Underwood and Underwood set.

M. E. G.