Story Telling for Camp Fire Girls
By Ellen Kate Gross
Chief Guardian, Children’s Playground Association of Baltimore, Md.
Apropos to our conversation at the Richmond Congress in regard to stories for Camp Fire Girls, the following plea is submitted to your editorial board with the hope that your splendid magazine will help us in one phase of our work.
In furthering the development of the Camp Fire Girls, there arises the necessity for a supply of Indian folk tales well told and embodying the out-of-door spirit of the Indian and his ideals. Moreover the various points of the law of the Camp Fire can best be exemplified through stories which develop the ideal held up. This law is to
- “Seek beauty
- Give service
- Pursue knowledge
- Hold on to health
- Glorify work
- Be happy”
The following suggestive list may illustrate how this method can be carried out,—the thought and meaning of each precept being developed through one of the stories named.
SEEK BEAUTY
- Hawthorne, “The Great Stone Face.”
- Kingsley, “Water Babies”—in parts.
GIVE SERVICE
- Robert Louis Stevenson, “Prince Otto.”
- Stockton, “Old Pypes and the Dryad,” in Fanciful Tales.
- Biographies and Autobiographies.
- Example “Florence Nightingale.”
- “Lucretia Mott.”
- “The Little Hero of Haarlem”
- Emile Poulsson, “Nahum Prince,” in “In the Child’s World.”