This is the sister, who plays with her doll;
And this is the baby, the pet of all.
Behold the good family, great and small!
In such a song, the dawning consciousness of the child is turned to the family relations, and is surely an improvement on the old nursery method of playing “This little pig went to market.”
There are also little story finger-plays in which gestures may be employed as in the finger-play rhymes. A collection of these finger stories, the first play stories for infants, is given in “Descriptive Stories for All the Year,” by M. Burnham; and in “Finger Plays,” by Emilie Poulsson.
PLAYING THE STORIES
In early childhood, as soon as a story takes possession of the child, he shows a tendency to enter into its persons and its action; to mimic the voices, to ape the manners, to imitate the acts. This is the instinct of imitation and play. The child should be allowed to play out the story in this way, or better still, the parent or teacher may propose playing the story. Not every story may be played equally well, but the following familiar child’s stories may be used in play and heartily enjoyed without staging or any stage terms—just natural, spontaneous, hearty play: “Little Red Ridinghood,” “The Fox and the Grapes,” “The Lion and the Mouse,” “The Hare and the Tortoise,” “Dick Whittington and His Cat,” “Androcles and the Lion,” and others in this book.
“The Fox and the Grapes” (page 67) may be played by a single child. A wall is selected for holding the imaginary bunches of grapes. The child stands or crouches, looking up longingly at them, then jumps up for them, and, finally, after a fall, walks or crawls away, saying, “I know those grapes are sour and not worth eating.”
“The Lion and the Mouse” (page 74) may be played by two children. One child, choosing to be a lion, lies flat on the floor taking a nap. The child acting as a mouse crawls over him, awakening the lion, who roars and pins the mouse to the earth with his paw. “Let me go! I’ll help you some time,” cries the mouse, and, being freed, runs away. Later the lion is in an imaginary net, the meshes of which the mouse gnaws, and then runs away, saying, “I did help you after all, you see.”