For the Story Teller: Story Telling and Stories to Tell

by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey

“Tell us another!”

It is the natural, to-be-desired longing of the child mind to be satiated with good stories. We endeavor to meet the children’s wish for a number of stories in each story hour but we often hurt the mental and moral effect of one story by telling in close connection another story that has no interest connection with the last one told. We lead the child from one story interest to another with slight attention to the influence which the story group will have upon the minds of the children. We tell, perhaps, a home story, then a nature story, and last of all a holiday story in one story hour, and in doing this we so quickly transfer the child’s attention from one theme to a distinctly different one that there is no cohesion in our story building. We break down instead of building up the powers of concentration of our children.

Planning a group of stories for one story hour is quite as much a matter to be studied as is the selection of each individual story in the group and preparing this story for telling. The story combination selected by the story teller must have the qualities of cohesion, unity of theme, and related interests to make the story hour valuable in the child’s life. On the other hand, the unity of theme in the separate stories chosen must be emphasized by contrasting story treatment of this central theme. A group of stories in which each story is just like its predecessor and similar to the story that follows will tire the child listeners. We must bring about cohesion in the story hour by means of contrast in the treatment of each story.

Our first thought in planning story groups will be:

Select the story theme for the story hour.

This story theme will be some idea which we want to bring forcefully to the minds of our children. The story hour motif may be: animals, the home, trades, birds, flowers, heroes, a holiday or some ethical theme as: honesty, truth or charity, but each of the stories selected for the story group will have an animal, home, trade, bird, flower, hero, holiday, honesty, truth or charity theme.

Our second thought in planning story groups will be:

Select stories which present the selected theme in contrasting treatment.

Three stories form an excellent number for one story hour. Each of these stories will illustrate one central idea that a continuing thread of interest may be carried through the story group and knotted at the end of the story hour. But each story will make a different mental appeal in presenting the theme that the children may have the benefit of contrast in helping them to concentrate upon listening to all the stories that make up the group.

The first of these three stories should be selected having in mind the securing of the involuntary attention of the children. It should be an apperceptive story that finds quick interpretation in the minds of the children because its ideas are their ideas, its scenes are familiar to theirs and its characters are people like the people whom they meet and know in their every-day environment. Having caught the children’s attention involuntarily by a story that finds a place by its familiarity of treatment in their own lives, the second story in the group may make a different mental appeal. It may make the children reason; it may take them far afield in their thinking, it may be the longest story in the group and so call for greater concentration on the part of the story teller.