For the Story Teller: Story Telling and Stories to Tell

by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey

—he has acquired a good working vocabulary of English.

So there are a score of similar repetitional stories that help a child to learn ready speech. The Greedy Cat repeats the tale of his prowess:

“I have eaten my friend the mouse. I have eaten an old woman, and a man and a donkey, and the King and all his elephants. What is to hinder my eating you, too?”

Chicken Little bewails to every one she meets:

“The sky is falling.”

And in answer to the query “How do you know?” she assures her questioner:

“I saw it with my eyes, I heard it with my ears, and a bit of it fell upon my tail.”

In Maud Lindsay’s story of “The Little Gray Pony” there is a delightfully interpolated jingle that repeats itself and adds to itself in such fascinating fashion that children cannot resist saying with the story teller:

“Storekeeper! Storekeeper! I’ve come to you;