By general consent colored papers have been chosen as the most available material for this work, because while relatively cheap, the purest colors possible in pigments are secured, and the material is adapted to the most elementary manual training and education in form as well as color.
It is not the author's aim to here provide a definite course of lessons to be given in a perfunctory way or in a fixed order, but rather to furnish suggestions based on practical work in the schoolroom that may be of value to those who have carefully examined the preceding pages of this book and become familiar with the experiments described. The suggestions are based on the experience of teachers who have been using the system here advocated for several years and testing it in various ways, and therefore it is hoped that they may be of value to any earnest worker who is not fully satisfied with her efforts in teaching color up to date. Consequently a brief outline of work is suggested for the earliest years, according to a definite order, and then further suggestions and experiments are introduced, somewhat in the order in which they may naturally present themselves.
The time has passed when it is necessary to offer any argument for the study of color in the schoolroom. Every child begins his school life with many color impressions which he has been acquiring since the day when his baby fingers first stretched toward some bit of color, and his development demands a clear presentation to him during the earliest school years of the fundamental facts concerning color upon which all later work must be based.
The Glass Prism.
A glass prism is one of the first requisites in the appliances for teaching color, and a prism which may be bought for a few cents will work wonders in the hands of an interested teacher, although a more perfect instrument, such as is sold with physical apparatus, will give colors which are better defined.
Experience in many schoolrooms has proved that a spectrum can be shown somewhere in the average room at some hour in every sunny day, especially in the longer days of spring and summer, and it is well to have the prism when not in use so fixed as to project the spectrum into the room much of the time, so that it may become familiar to the younger children.
Observation of the spectrum enthuses the children with a feeling for color which can be developed in no other way, and they never tire with watching the wonderful vibrating effects of the liquid colors; and by studying it the mental image of each of the six colors becomes as distinct as that of the cube after it has been handled and modeled. If the schoolroom is provided with shutters or dark curtains a much better spectrum can be produced by closing them, as even a slight change from a bright sunny daylight has a very perceptible effect in bringing out the colors. A person who has never seen a carefully prepared spectrum in a room almost perfectly dark can have no realizing sense of the purest possible expressions of color.
Accident once disclosed a simple means by which one teacher secured a very good spectrum. There was a deep, dark closet opening from the schoolroom and one bright day when the prism was being used the spectrum was accidentally thrown into this closet, and the sudden and enthusiastic expression of approval by those pupils who were in position to discover it was certainly interesting to the teacher of that country school, with a dark coal closet.
In a spectrum such as can be produced in a dark room with the most perfect form of prism, all the various colors can be separated and carefully examined and by special appliances compared with pigmentary colors. Experiments of this kind are exceedingly interesting and instructive, and demonstrate the wonderful intensity and purity of the spectrum colors as compared with the purest pigmentary colors that can be produced. Such experiments were carried to a great degree of perfection when the six standard colors for the Bradley Colored Papers were selected.