These bits of repeated phrasing in a story, scraps of incorporated lyrics and jingles and built-up cumulative paragraphs are like the beads that help to make the child’s necklace. On them he strings the thread of the story narrative, making it so thoroughly a part of his mental life that he is able to give it out again in the remembered words of the story. Long after the loved, “huffing and puffing” of the wolf in the story of the “Three Little Pigs” has become only a memory, a child uses the words, furze, blazing, scramble, fortune—and a hundred other words that came to him in this happy story connection and so into his every-day conversation.
The older child who has passed the nursery tale and folk lore turnstile in his story road finds help to a greater power in verbal expression by means of the beautifully written story, told in its original pure phrasing by the story teller and enriching him because of its wonderful English. A truly well-wrought story suffers often at the hands of the story teller. It isn’t necessary in telling such a story to bring it down to the plane of the children’s intelligence; rather we will bring the children up to its heights of beautiful imagery and mellow phrasing.
In telling Henry Ward Beecher’s story of “The Anxious Leaf,” in “Norwood,” the story should be memorized by the story teller. No word of its vivid picturing should be lost. It is a short story so this method of preparing it for telling will not be irksome. A little girl six years old who had been told this story several times was out walking one fall with her mother. She picked up a dead leaf, from the ground, and holding it tenderly in her hand, she repeated softly:
“Then the little leaf began to want to go and it grew very beautiful in thinking about it.
“And a little puff of wind came and tossed it like a spark of fire in the air and it fell gently down under the edge of the fence among hundreds of other leaves; and it fell into a dream and never waked up to tell what it dreamed about—”
This child’s vocabulary had been deeply enriched by a story.
In Laura Richards’ stories we find pure English that will help children. In Rudyard Kipling’s “Jungle Stories” and the “Just So Stories” there is virile wording that every child needs. Dean Hodges’ “Bible Stories” preserve for children the line phrasing of the Hebrews as almost no other Bible story teller has succeeded in doing. Hans Christian Andersen’s best translators have kept for us his matchless word painting. Such stories as these teach a child purer use of English. Eugene Field’s few child stories; “The Legend of Claus,” “The Mouse and the Moonbeam,” “The Maple Leaf and the Violet” sing in their classic wording. No child can hear them without having his vocabulary enriched.
It is quite possible to accomplish a great deal through story telling, not only in teaching English to the child who is foreign born or dormant mentally, but in giving the average child new and more colorful examples of word painting than he has heard before.
The steps in story telling for verbal expression in children are:
Selection. The story must be worth while telling from the point of view of its phrasing. In the case of the child who really needs to be taught to talk, short, rhymed or cumulative tales are useful. With older children we will select those beautiful examples of classic story telling that should form part of a child’s mental life and so help him to express himself in pure diction.