Lessons in chalk modeling: The new method of map drawing

by Ida Cassa Heffron

A structural map suitable to all grades of pupils, the lower as well as the higher grades, seems highly essential; especially should it be one that is adapted to the teacher’s use while before the class—one to teach from. This should be entirely different from a reference map. It should plainly show the great facts of physical geography or surface structure, as well as some detail, and this in a simple form. For the lower grades there should be no lines to mark the political divisions, neither should there be any names of countries, states, or cities to designate localities.

Everything should be omitted that would have a tendency to divert the attention from the chief function of the map which is, to aid in the formation of a mental picture or image, corresponding to the structural features of the real country or continent.

The Chalk Modeled Map. These maps, following the use of the putty or plaster relief maps, should be the only ones placed before the pupils of the third and fourth grades, or even higher grades, until they have gained mental power to read and understand the signs and symbols of the map, and realize clearly the chief structural features of the whole globe.

The student should be enabled by the use of maps to picture in his mind the configuration of the whole earth; the distribution and shape of land and water surfaces, the great structural division of continents, the slopes and counter-slopes with their crowned heights and level plains, the great land masses and river basins, peninsulas, gulfs and bays, islands and their relation to the mainland.

In fine, the whole world surface should become a reality to him if the map is rightly taught. This will be an easy matter for a teacher who is alive to the beauty of the world around us and who has a personal knowledge or clearly pictured concepts of the real country. Such an one will readily see the value of the maps as an aid to the pupil in gaining a comprehensive mental picture of the earth’s surface.

She will remember that the mere placing of the maps before the pupil is not enough, that they will be as unmeaning to him as the flat political map, unless he has already in mind the primary concepts acquired through observation of surface forms, and has made his inference as to cause from the effects seen.

Of what value will it be to him to know that certain lines indicate a mountain range or river, unless he has an approximate idea of what a mountain range or river is?

For the use of the more advanced pupils of the higher grades, who see the relation of structural environment to man in his development as a nation, the relation of natural structural divisions to political divisions, these maps should have lines drawn upon them to indicate the boundaries of such divisions. Names, also, of countries, mountain and river systems should be marked, and the large bodies of water of the interior. Later on, the smaller divisions of states and provinces, gulfs and bays, lakes and rivers, with their tributaries, should be shown, and important cities may also be located; in the end, all the data needed as a reference map.

The map devised to fulfil these conditions, and now in considerable use in this country, is called the “Chalk Modeled Map.” It is drawn to represent surface structure in relief, giving much of the effect of an engraving or photograph of a relief map, yet intrinsically more truthful and artistic than any such representation could be.

There is an immense difference between this and a drawing from a relief map, or from a photograph of one. In this map the delineator expresses at first hand his own concept of the continental structure, as the artist or poet expresses in his work his own original ideas. We feel his thought in the very quality of line used. We read how the truths have appealed to his own consciousness. It stands where the relief map itself stands, as representing the delineator’s own mental image of such structure.