Once upon a time there was a little boy named Peter and a little boy named Boris. And Peter took him out for a walk and took him all around school. Then I took him out to my house and saw all my play things. And then I took him to Central Park and showed him sea lions and the giraffe and the elephant and I showed how they eat by their trunks. And he thought it was queer. And he said he was afraid of animals and so I took him home. I told him to tell his mother about it and his mother said, “You want to go for another walk?” and he said, “Yes, but not where the wild animals are.” I said, “Do you want to go to Central Park?” and he said, “Yes.” You see he got fooled! He didn’t know about the wild animals.
Joint Story by Six-Year-Old Class
I like it when the boy and the girl look at the sky. They look at the trees and they are sleepy. It is dark outside. It is night and the sky is dark blue. And it is kind of whitish and the trees are next to the blue sky. The bright evening star is out. The star is so far up in the sky that you can hardly see it. The children are looking at the sky before they go to bed and they are praying to God. They have their nightgowns on. The bed is all nice so they couldn’t have just got up. The clothes are hanging on the bed. They sleep in their own bed together. When they go to bed they have their door closed.
“The Leaf Story” and “The Wind Story” I have incorporated with my stories, though they are almost entirely the work of children. In both cases the organization is beyond the children. But the content and the phraseology bear their unmistakable imprint. The same is true of “The Sea Gull.”
Because of the pattern, the play aspect of language, I believe in written stories even for very little ones. If we loved our language better and played with its sound in our ordinary speech, perhaps stories for two- and three-year-olds would not be needed. But as it is, we need to present them with something more intentional, more thought out than is possible with most of us in a story told. If the patterns of our ideas or of our speech are to have charm, if they are to fit the occasion with nicety, if they are to flow easily and are to be continuous enough to be comprehended by little children, they will need careful attention,—attention that cannot be given under the emergency of telling a story, not, at least, by the uninspired of us. Inevitably, with our utilitarian tendencies, we shall be drawn off to an undue regard of the content to the neglect of the expression. And yet, for very little children, there is unquestionably something lost by the formality and fixity of a written story. A story told has more spontaneity, allows more leeway to include the chance happenings or remarks of the children; it can be more intimately personal, more adapted to the particular occasion and to the particular child. Perhaps some time we shall achieve a fortunate compromise, a stepping stone between the story told and the story read. Perhaps we shall work out happy or characteristic phrases about familiar things,—little personal things about the clothes and habits of each child, general familiar things like autos and wagons and horses on the street, coal going down the hole in the sidewalk, the squabbling of sparrows in the dirt, the drift of snow on the roofs,—perhaps we shall learn to use such thought-out phrases or refrains like blocks for building many stories. If we could work out some such technique as this, we could keep the intimacy, the flexibility, the waywardness of the spoken story and still give the children the charm of careful thinking and careful phrasing. Many such phrases have been fashioned by people sensitive to the quality of sound. Every nursery has had its rooster crow:
“Cock-a-doodle-doo!”
But few have given its children that delightful epitome of the songs of spring birds which has piped with irrepressible freshness now for nearly four centuries:
“Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!”
I have never known the child who did not respond to Kipling’s engine song:
“With a michnai-ghignai-shtingal! Yah! Yah! Yah!”