Girls and boys of Norway and Sweden want to be good ski runners and ski jumpers. They begin to ski when they are very young. The young children run only on small hills near the school. The older girls and boys go out to longer mountainsides for their practice.
Of course many pupils get tumbles in the snow as they learn to run on skis. The teacher says, “To be a good ski runner, you must have courage to try, and if you fail, you must laugh and try again.”
Some children of the North lands go to school in the summer too. But the summer school is very different from the regular school. “Summer school is much more fun,” Martha, a Swedish girl, said after she had spent a summer in a camp and had studied with a camp teacher. Her brother Nils likes camp school too.
Martha and Nils are twins. They were nine years old when they went to the summer camp.
MARTHA AND NILS PICKING BERRIES
That summer Martha picked gooseberries. She learned to make gooseberry pie, gooseberry jelly, and gooseberry preserves. Nils only helped to take the stems off the berries, but he thought that was fun when he worked with the other girls and boys of the camp.
NILS HELPING TO REPAIR THE ROOF
Nils helped to repair the roof on one of the summerhouses. That roof was of red tile. Nils carefully measured and fitted each piece of tile into its proper place.