DOUBLE TAP TO ZOOM WITH PHONE OR TABLET John Amos Comenius | 33 instruction books. In order of difficulty but not of publication, they are Orbis Pic- tus, the Vestibulum, the Janua Linguarum Reserata, and the Atrium. Orbis Pictus Orbis Pictus translates to “The World in Pictures.” This book is generally regarded as the first illustrated book for children. While the idea of an illustrated textbook was not original to Comenius, he was one of the first to use it in elementary lan- guage instruction. Comenius, in keeping with his pansophic outlook, included a wide variety of subject matter in Orbis Pictus. A sense of the subjects covered is given by some of the chapter titles: “God,” “The World,” “The Heavens,” “Fire,” “The Air,” “The Water,” “The Clouds,” “The Earth,” “The Fruits of the Earth,” “The Met- als,” “Tame Fowls,” “Singing Birds,” “Birds That Haunt the Fields and Woods,” and “Ravenous Birds.” Under the pictures in each chapter are two columns, one describ- ing the picture in the vernacular and the other describing it in Latin. With Orbis Pictus, Comenius hoped to achieve several different goals. One of these was to entice children to learn by using pictures, which are attractive and interesting to them. Another was to turn the child’s attention to words and things. Finally, Comenius believed that interest and attention are the prerequisites for readiness to learn. Pictures thus facilitate the learning process and the child’s will- ingness to follow a teacher’s instructions. Orbis Pictus gained enormous popularity and was translated into many languages and continued in print well into the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries. Janua Linguarum Reserata Comenius wrote Janua Linguarum Reserata (The Door of Languages Unlocked) during his stay in Lissa. Comenius fashioned his book after a Janua published several decades earlier by a Jesuit priest. But Comenius geared his Janua to the elementary and secondary student. Again, its aim was encyclopedic, and in one hundred chapters, Comenius covered everything from the origin of the world to the mind and its faculties. As in the Orbis Pictus, the text was presented in adjoin- ing columns, one with the subject in German and the corresponding column in Latin. Comenius had a definite method in mind for the use of this text. Each chapter was to be read ten times. At each reading the student had to engage in an ever more complex rendering of the material. The method took the student from a literal COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL