And Arabella clapped her hands and danced around the table. And Araminta clapped her hands and danced around the table.
Adult ears repudiate anything as obvious as this; they still, however, enjoy a ballad refrain.
Just as small children cannot hear complications, so they cannot grasp details if the movement is swift. We must give time for a child’s slow reactions. We usually fail to do this in ordinary social situations and are often surprised to hear our three-year-old say “good-bye” long after the front door is closed and our guest well on his way down the street. In stories we must take a leisurely pace. We must also read very slowly allowing ample time for a child to give the full motor expression to his thought for the art of abbreviation he has not yet learned.
It is not enough to recognize that since a child attends to but one thing at a time the units must be simple. Here in the form as in the content, must the motor quality of a child’s thinking be held constantly in mind. In trying to find the general subject matter appropriate for little children I said that they think through their muscles. This motor expression of small children has its direct application in the concrete method of telling of any happening. The story child who is experiencing, should go through the essential muscular performances which the real listening child would go through if he were actually experiencing himself. For he thinks through these muscular expressions. As an example, when a group of four-year-olds heard a story about a little boy who saw the elevated train approach and pass above him, they thought the child might have been run over. The words “up” and “above” and “overhead” had been used but the children failed to get the idea of “upness.” Unquestionably they would have understood if I had made the little boy throw back his head and look up. Small children act with big gestures and with big muscles. And they think through the same mechanisms.
These two principles, simplicity and continuity, apply concretely to sentence and phrase structure as well. The effort to obtain continuity for the child explains the colloquial “The little boy who lived in this house, he did so and so——” You help your child back to the subject, “the little boy” by the grammatically redundant “he” after his mind has gone off on “this house.” This same need for continuity also explains why a child’s own stories are characteristically one continuous sentence strung together with “ands” and “thens” and “buts.” He sees and hears and consequently thinks in a simple, rhythmic, continuous flow. If we would have him see and hear and think with us, we must give him his stories and verse in simple units closely and obviously linked together.
But after all is said and done, why should we give children stories at all? Is it to instruct and so should we pay attention to the content? Is it to delight and so should we pay attention to the form? Both things, information and relish, have their place in justifying stories for children. But both to my mind are of minor importance compared to a third and quite different thing,—and this is to get children to create stories of their own, to play with words. “To get” is an unhappy phrase for it suggests that children must be coaxed to the task. This I do not believe though I cannot prove it. I do believe that children play with words naturally and spontaneously just as they play with any material that comes to their creative hands. And further I believe,—though this too I cannot prove,—that we adults kill this play with words just as we kill their creative play with most things. Most of us have forgotten how to play with anything, most of all with words. We are utilitarian, we are executive, we are didactic, we are earth-tied, we are hopelessly adult! Actually children use their ears and noses and fingers much more than do we adults. Our stories rely mainly upon visual recalls. We forget to listen even to birds whose message is pure melody. And how many of us hear the city sounds which surround us, the characteristic whirr of revolving wheels, the vibrating rhythm of horses’ feet, the crunch of footsteps in the snow? Noises we hear, the warning shriek of the fire engine or the honk! honk! of the automobile. But the subtler, finer reverberations we are not sensitive to. Yet little children love to listen and develop another method of sensing and appreciating their world by this pleasurable use of their hearing. It surely is an unused opportunity for story-tellers. I have tried to use it in “Pedro’s Feet” which is an attempt to give them an ordinary story by means of sounds. And even less than to city sounds do we listen for the cadences in language. We listen only for the meaning and forget the sensuous delight of sound.
But happily children are not so determined to wring a meaning out of every sight and every sound. Children play. Play is a child’s own technique. Through it he seizes the strange unknown world around him and fashions it into his very own. He recreates through play. And through creating, he learns and he enjoys.
There is no better play material in the world than words. They surround us, go with us through our work-a-day tasks, their sound is always in our ears, their rhythms on our tongue. Why do we leave it to special occasions and to special people to use these common things as precious play material? Because we are grown-ups and have closed our ears and our eyes that we may not be distracted from our plodding ways! But when we turn to the children, to hearing and seeing children, to whom all the world is as play material, who think and feel through play, can we not then drop our adult utilitarian speech and listen and watch for the patterns of words and ideas? Can we not care for the way we say things to them and not merely what we say? Can we not speak in rhythm, in pleasing sounds, even in song for the mere sensuous delight it gives us and them, even though it adds nothing to the content of our remark? If we can, I feel sure children will not lose their native use of words: more, I think those of six and seven and eight who have lost it in part,—and their stories show they have,—will win back to their spontaneous joy in the play of words. This is the ultimate test of stories and verse,—whether they help children to retain their native gift of play with language and with thought.
In the City and Country School where my experiments in language have been carried on, we have not gone far enough to offer convincing proof along these lines. But I submit two stories told by a six-year-old class which are at least suggestive. The first is the best story told to me by any member of the class before any effort had been made to get the children to listen to the sound of their words or to think of their ideas as all pointing in one direction and giving a single impression. The second was told by the class as a whole while looking at Willebeek Le Mair’s illustration of “Twinkle, twinkle, little star.” They said the picture made them feel sleepy and that they would say only things that made them sleepy and use only words that made them sleepy. Between the two stories I had met with them seven times. I had read them sounding and rhythmic verse. They had become interested in the sound of language apart from its meaning. They had become interested in the sound of the rain and the fire. They were thinking through their ears. Am I mistaken in believing this shows in their language and in their thought?
Story by a Six-Year-Old