12. Do not try to memorize a story, except possibly the conversations.
13. If a story is clearly told, the child will usually absorb and discern the ethical principle involved, without any necessity on your part to obtrusively “point the moral.” Sometimes a child will draw an erroneous or unexpected inference because his judgment is yet immature or his ethical experience is elementary or perverted. Under such a condition, try to tell another story that will concretely clear his thought.
When you are able to tell a story spontaneously, joyfully, forgetting yourself, losing yourself in the story and in the children’s interest, you will be ready to study story-telling as a science and an art, and you will have learned by your experience some of the fundamental principles of the art.
The first requisite, however, is spontaneity, naturalness, self-confidence. To attempt to study method before attaining this quality is to incur the danger of substituting “finish” for vitality.
Times and Occasions. For effective story-telling choose the time when the child can give attention, and when the environment is without disturbing influences of noise, sights, other interests, interruptions. There are occasions, however, when the child is restless, tired, irritable, when a story that has much of rhythm and repetition will soothe him.
It is certainly unwise to try to secure his concentration when he is hungry, or eager for active exercise. Bedtime stories usually should be told before the child is undressed, and should be of a quiet, sedative kind, that the child may not be kept awake either through excitement, or thinking on vivid pictures.
Let the child have opportunity to absorb it into his soul. Therefore wait for the child, in his own time, to give it back, either by telling it, dramatizing, painting, drawing, cutting, modeling. This will foster the child’s initiative. When the child himself asks “What shall I do” is time enough to suggest directly such reproduction. Meantime, as a means of suggestion, it is valuable thus to illustrate a story yourself some time after it is told—immediately or some hours or days later. When the child is ready, he will imitate and ask to do it also, but his response should be spontaneous on his part, and of his own initiative.
Selection of Stories. Story-telling naturally begins in the latter part of the first year, with simple finger plays, and the cadence of Mother Goose. Here belong “This Little Pig”, “Open the Door”, “Ride a Cock Horse”, and other simple rhythmic nursery rhymes.
In the second and third year, more of the simple finger plays, such as “Here’s a Ball for Baby”, and the Mother Goose rhymes that have much repetition, can be used. During this stage the child loves little anecdotes about babies, dogs, cats, mother, father. In the “tell it again” stage from two to six the child enjoys following a sequence of incidents and seeing the pictures.
It is in the fourth or fifth year that his imagination and store of mental pictures is sufficiently developed so that he can make up stories of his own, and now his imagination is not yet limited by an appreciation of realities. This is the stage when fairy tales and myths begin. Interest in nonsense syllables, long words, rhyme, absurdity of statement, humorous situations, is now ripening.