(2) Imitation. The activity of this period is distinctly imitative. Just as the child must learn to form letters by copying them before he can develop an individual style of writing, so he must learn right action by imitating it before he can be independent and original. Every time a child imitates an action he understands its meaning better, he fixes it more securely in memory and he also makes its repetition so much the easier.
It is important, therefore, to note what he naturally imitates. In this period it is some definite act, not the spirit nor life of the actor. He does not aspire to resemble the character of the teacher, but he does try to speak and move and look as she does. As the action is performed, the life unconsciously but surely becomes like the one who is imitated.
(3) Curiosity. Because the child has everything to learn God has made him want to learn everything. As physical hunger arouses an effort to supply the need for physical food, so mental hunger or curiosity arouses an effort to supply mental food. It is most active in the period of greatest absorption, when the life must store for future use. There are two points in relation to curiosity which it is important for the Sunday-school teacher to remember.
(a) Its field of operation, or that toward which it is directed. Curiosity is selective, going out only toward those things in which the life is interested. In this period the child's interests are in activities in Nature and everyday life and in the things about him; but he desires to know only the simplest facts concerning them. What the object is, where it came from, and what it will do, usually satisfy his curiosity regarding it. The teacher, therefore, is guided in the selection of what shall be given the child in a lesson.
(b) Its channels of operation or that through which it acts. The channels through which curiosity reaches out for knowledge and brings back the results of its search are the senses. Every waking moment finds them taking in sensations which are carried to the brain through the nervous system. The more perfect the senses in their working the more correct the message they bring. Failure to learn and inattention are usually caused by some defect in the senses or other part of the body.
While an adult can arrive at new ideas through other ideas, the child must receive practically all his ideas through his senses. This guides the teacher as to the method of presenting the lesson.
(4) Fancy. This is the early form of imagination, unleashed and untrammeled, which transforms objects, gives soul to inanimate things and creates for the child his own beautiful play world.
(5) Self-interest. The beginner himself is the center of his little world. His thinking and his feeling revolve around his own personality, and his own advantage is the thing he constantly seeks. This is God's order of development. The consideration for others will follow later, but even now the child may be led into loving, unselfish acts through imitation and personal influence.
(6) Faith. Perhaps the better term in the beginning would be credulity, for faith is confidence which has a basis in knowledge, and knowledge does not necessarily enter into a child's belief. Anything an older person tells him is accepted unquestioningly, no matter of what sort it may be.
This means a great responsibility and an unequaled opportunity in the matter of religious instruction. The stories of God's power and the love of Jesus Christ are absorbed into the life, neither proof nor explanation being necessary nor indeed comprehensible. As the stories multiply in the home and the Sunday-school that which was credulity at first becomes genuine faith. The child does not reason that God will do because he has done, but a feeling of the Divine strength and love grips him and out of this feeling grows loving confidence in the One who first loved him. If a child passes through the Beginners department without this response, his teacher has been out of touch with her Lord.