CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Apperceptive Basis of Story Telling[ 1]
II. The Story with a Sense Appeal[ 23]
III. When the Curtain Rises[ 41]
IV. Using Suspense to Develop Concentration[ 57]
V. Story Climax[ 83]
VI. Training a Child’s Memory by Means of a Story[ 105]
VII. The Instinct Story[ 122]
VIII. The Dramatic Story[ 142]
IX. Story Telling an Aid to Verbal Expression[ 171]
X. Stimulating the Emotions by Means of a Story[ 191]
XI. Imagination and the Fairy Story[ 212]
XII. Making Over Stories[ 231]
XIII. Planning Story Groups[ 245]
STORIES FOR TELLING
The Cap that Mother Made, adapted from Swedish Fairy Tales[ 8]
Goody Two Shoes[ 16]
The Three Cakes, from Monsieur Berquin’s L’Ami des Enfants[ 35]
The Prince’s Visit, Horace E. Scudder[ 52]
The Travels of a Fox, Clifton Johnson[ 60]
Little Lorna Doone, adapted from Richard Blackmore[ 68]
Little In-a-Minute[ 76]
Old Man Rabbit’s Thanksgiving Dinner[ 92]
The Great Stone Face, adapted from Nathaniel Hawthorne[ 98]
Little Tuk, Hans Christian Andersen[ 115]
The Selfish Giant, Oscar Wilde[ 133]
The Gingerbread Boy (dramatized), Carolyn Sherwin Bailey[ 153]
The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse (dramatized), Carolyn Sherwin Bailey[ 163]
The Woodpecker Who Was Selfish, adapted from an Indian Folk Tale[ 181]
The Little Rabbit Who Wanted Red Wings, adapted from a Southern Folk Tale[ 185]
The Little Lame Prince, adapted from Miss Mulock[ 201]
The Blue Robin, Mary Wilkins Freeman[ 219]
The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf, Hans Christian Andersen[ 238]

FOR THE STORY
TELLER

CHAPTER I
THE APPERCEPTIVE BASIS OF STORY TELLING

APPERCEPTION is a formidable and sometimes confusing term for a very simple and easy-to-understand mental process. I once told Seumus MacManus’ deliciously humorous story of Billy Beg and his Bull to a group of foreign boys and girls in one of New York’s East Side Settlement Houses. The children listened with apparent appreciation, but, halfway along in the story, it occurred to me to ask them if they had ever seen a bull. No one answered me at first. Then Pietro, a little dusky-eyed son of Italy, raised a grimy hand.

“I seen one last summer when we was on a fresh-air,” he said. “It’s a bigger cow, a bull is, with the bicycle handle-bars on her head.”

Pietro’s description of a bull was an example of apperception, the method by means of which a new idea is interpreted, classified, “let into” the human mind. He knew the class, cows. He also knew the class, bicycles. He did not know the class, bulls—at least vividly enough to be able to put the idea into terms of a verbal explanation and description. So he did the most natural thing in the world, the only possible mental process in fact by means of which children or adults classify the new. He interpreted it in terms of the old, explaining the unfamiliar idea, bull, by means of the familiar ideas, cow and a bicycle.

This, then, is apperception. It is the involuntary mental process by means of which the human mind makes its own the strange, the new, the unfamiliar idea by a method of fitting it into the class of familiar ideas already known. Apperception is a means of quick mental interpretation. It is the welcoming of strangers to the mind-habitation, strangers who come every day in the guise of unfamiliar names, terms, scenes, and phrases, and determining in which corner of the brain house they will fit most comfortably. The most natural process is finally to give these new ideas an old mind corner to rest in, or an old brain path in which to travel.

A child’s mind at the age when he is able to concentrate upon listening to a story, three or four years of age—kindergarten age—is not a very crowded house. It is a mind-house tenanted by a few and very simple concepts which he has made his own through his previous home, mother and play experiences. He is familiar with his nursery, his pets, his family, his toys, his food, his bed. If he is a country child he knows certain flowers, birds and farm animals, not as classes—flower, bird and animal—but as buttercup, robin and sheep. If he is a city child his mind has a very different tenantry, and he thinks in terms of street, subway, park, fire engine, ambulance. These to the city child are also individual ideas, not classes. He knows them as compelling, noisy, moving ideas which he has seen and experienced, but they do not at all appeal to him as classes.

The story of “The Three Bears” is an obviously interesting one to children upon entering school. It has its basis of interest in its apperceptive quality, and it illustrates better than almost any other story for children those qualities which bring about quick mental interpretation on the part of the listener. The unusual, strange, hazardous characters in the story, the three bears, are introduced to the child in old, comfortably familiar terms which catch his interest from the first sentence of the story. It is extremely doubtful if the story of three bears set in a polar or forest environment would ever have been popular so long or made so many children happy as has the story of the historical three bears who lived in a house, ate porridge from bowls, sat in chairs and slept in beds. Nor are these the only apperceptive links between the life of the bears and that of the child. There is a tiny bear in the story, the size, one may presuppose, of the child who is listening to the story. The to-be-classified idea, bear, is presented to children in this old folk tale in terms of already known ideas, house, porridge, chair, bed and tiny. Very few story tellers have appreciated the underlying psychologic appeal of the story of “The Three Bears,” but it illustrates a quality in stories that we must look for if we wish to make the story we select a permanency in the child’s mental life.

The apperceptive basis of story telling consists in study on the part of the story teller to discover what is the store of ideas in the minds of the children who will listen to the story.

Has the story too many new ideas for the child to be able to classify them in terms of his old ideas? On the other hand, has it one or two new thoughts so carefully presented through association with already familiar concepts that the child will be able to make them his own and give them a permanent place in his mind with the old ones?

A child’s mind is an eery place for an adult to try and enter. Teachers, kindergartners and story tellers are a little prone to think that a knowledge of one child’s mental content gives them the power to know the mind of the child-at-large. Our psychologists have given us studies of child mind, not child minds. This mind hypothesis is, perhaps, sufficient for the general working out of systems of teaching, but success in the delicate art of story telling means a most critical study and observation of the minds of the special group of children who will hear the story. The story teller must ask herself these questions:

“What do these children know?”

“Have they any experience other than that of the home on which to bank?”

“Do they come from homes of leisure or homes of industry?”

“Have they had a country or a city experience?”

“Have they passed from the stage of development when toys formed their play interest to the game stage in which chance and hazard interest them more deeply?”

“Are they American children, familiar with American institutions, or are they little aliens in our land, unfamiliar with and confused by our ways?”

When she has satisfactorily answered these questions, the story teller will select her story having for its theme, atmosphere and motif an idea or group of ideas that will touch the child’s mental life as she has discovered it and by means of which it will find a permanent place in his mind through its comfortable friendliness and familiarity.

The child who has come directly from his home and the sheltering arms of his mother or nurse should not, at first, be taken far afield through the lands of fairies and giants. If he is told a fairy story, it should have for its content the sweet, homely qualities that characterize the home. I am using as a good example of the apperceptive story, “The Cap that Mother Made.” The child listeners are carried, it is true, to the palace of a King and are formally introduced to a Princess, but this is brought about through the familiar symbols of the home: mother, brothers, the farmer, and the queer little cap with its red and green stripes and blue tassel. Although Anders, the story hero, spends a happy hour at the Princess’ ball, he finally finds his way home again, and the story has an apperceptive appeal which is unusual. It is full of precious, familiar concepts that establish an association in the child’s mind between fairyland and home. After hearing the story, he will be very apt always to remember a palace as a very charming place to visit, but not to stay in, when one may go home to mother.