1. Tell something in which you and the children are interested, and keep at it repeatedly until you feel at ease.
2. Recall stories that interested you at that age.
3. Tell stories the children themselves ask for, refreshing your memory by reading up a standard version, or by asking the children to tell it to you.
4. Study Mother Goose, Æsop, and Bible stories as models of the best story-telling. 5. Live the story as you tell it—see it as pictures in your own mind. Tell it so vividly that the children can play it out afterwards.
6. Use direct speech in telling conversation.
7. Make your pictures vivid by a few descriptive words, especially of colors and sounds; increase your vocabulary of adjectives.
8. Beware of making it too long, especially for very little people.
9. Use perhaps a very few natural gestures, but do not try to act it out. Children have not the mental ability to hear narrative and see action at the same time.
10. Children love the same story repeated, and they want it told the same way, in order to see the same pictures; therefore have your story clear in your mind the first time you tell it.
11. If you are telling a classic or standard story, respect it as it is, just as honestly as you would an historic or scientific fact. If you do not wish to tell it that way, don’t tell it at all, but don’t tinker it.