STORIES SELECTED BECAUSE OF THEIR GENERAL APPERCEPTIVE APPEAL TO A CHILD UPON ENTERING SCHOOL
| The House that Jack Built | Mother Goose |
| The Three Bears | Folk Tale |
| The Three Little Pigs | “ “ |
| Little Red Riding Hood | “ “ |
| The Goat and the Seven Little Kids | “ “ |
| The Little Red Hen | “ “ |
| The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse | Æsop’s Fables |
| The Elves and the Shoemaker | The Brothers Grimm |
| The Top and the Ball | Hans Christian Andersen |
| How the Home Was Built | Maud Lindsay, in Mother Stories |
| The Little Gray Grandmother | Elizabeth Harrison, in Story Land |
| The Pig Brother | Laura E. Richards, in The Golden Windows |
| Grandfather’s Penny | In For the Children’s Hour |
| Tiny Tim | Adapted from Dickens, in For the Children’s Hour |
CHAPTER II
THE STORY WITH A SENSE APPEAL
THE senses are the only avenues to the brain by means of which the outside world makes its way into a little child’s inner consciousness. A baby’s brain is an almost unexplored, untracked place, empty save for a few instinct paths—certain motor tracts tenanted by inherited memories which lead him to cry, to nurse, and to perform some other reflex movements. This condition of the mind does not last long, however. The baby opens his eyes and sees the sunlight dancing in a yellow patch of gold upon the wall above his bed. Instantly, like a telegraphic message, there is delivered at the baby’s brain an idea, unnamed at first but ineffaceable—color. When he sees a red ball suspended by a string in front of his eager eyes, a second message is delivered at his mind-house, differentiating and localizing the first impression—color versus color. The formal names, red and yellow, do not enter into the process at all and are indeed quite unnecessary. The baby differentiates red and yellow months before he knows the color names.
The baby hears his mother’s voice and he receives by means of another telegraphic message the percept, sound. He touches a piece of ice, or his warm bottle, and learns by means of this direct contact, cold and warm. His nostrils admit the pleasurable odors of his scented bath, the dainty powder used for making his body comfortable or the bunch of roses that stands on his mother’s table, and he receives a new set of brain stimuli as he differentiates odors.
These are all such simple mental operations that we have rather taken them for granted, forgetting that Nature’s method of forcing, letting in impressions to the child’s mind, is the only way for us to give him knowledge. The surest way of educating a child is through an appeal to his senses. In a large degree this matter of sense training has been exemplified in hand work by the disciples of Froebel and Montessori, but the sense story has been completely overlooked. We have made little effort to appeal to a child’s mind through the story that has sense images of sight, touch, sound or taste to strengthen the mind impression which it makes.
If we analyze the story that has interested us most in a current magazine, we shall discover that, somehow, it made a direct appeal to our senses. It may have had the setting of some old garden, the description of which made us, in imagination, smell the clove pinks, roses, French lilacs and mignonette that grew in some garden of our childhood. Perhaps it was a sound story, giving us such speaking word pictures of bird songs, violin tones or even the human notes of voices that we almost heard the story instead of seeing it. On the other hand, the sense appeal of the story may have been that of color, of food—any sense stimulus that routed from their brain corners our old sense impressions and set them to working again. And it is almost impossible to gauge the effect upon cerebration of these stored-up sensory images.